New Hyde Park Realtor Adds, Sells Interest in Malls

A New Hyde Park real estate investment company is reshuffling its portfolio after adding properties in Canada while disposing of others, including one based in Illinois.

Kimco Realty Corporation had purchased a 50 percent share in Orleans Gardens Shopping Centre in Ottawa, Ontario, for $16.5 million on March 21, bringing the its Canadian shopping center portfolio to 64 properties according to MarketWatch.

Kimco, which has interests in 946 shopping centers across 44 states, making it the operator of North America’s largest portfolio of neighborhood and community shopping centers, then announced on April 6 that it had “sold off 15 shopping centers for $215.4 million, including the repayment of $83.7 million of mortgage debt,” according to GlobeSt.com.

Generally, the properties were in locations outside of Kimco’s target metropolitan statistical areas, according to Kimco’s VP of investor relations and corporate communications David F. Bujnicki said.

“...we identified a number of non-strategic shopping centers that we decided for a number of reasons, to dispose of them, primarily because they may have been in challenged markets, they may have had chronic vacancies, single-use, limited or low growth or just because we didn’t have the necessary scale of people in that geographic location.”

The divestments came during the first quarter of 2012 and “falls in-line with the company’s continued goals to focus on primary markets and properties anchored by strong, credit-worthy tenants.”

Bujnicki said that the REIT was “committed to disposing and selling these non-strategic shopping centers and reinvesting those proceeds back into the better markets that we want to focus on, or where we already had a presence.”