Sears Waves Goodbye To OC With Village Closure

Another anchor store space in Orange County is set to be vacated with the Sears at Village at Orange liquidating. It’s goodbye to Sears in OC once this door closes, with the only remaining businesses for Hoffman Estates, Ill.-based parent Transform SR Brands LLC, operating as Transformco, being the Orange shopping center’s Sears Auto Center and Sears Appliance Outlets in Brea and Santa Ana, respectively.
It marks a quiet end for a once-dominant name on the retail landscape, as digital continues to transform stores and malls—online and off.
The Orange location, totaling roughly 280,000 square feet, was one of 33 stores, a combination of Sears and Kmarts, marked for closure in a posting online from liquidation firm SB360 Capital Partners, which is handling the store closing sales.
The parcel of land, while part of the mall, is owned by Transformco, which subleased a portion of the store to 24 Hour Fitness in 2013.
The Orange mall, about 856,000 square feet, serves as a good indicator of creative mall metamorphosis to keep up with the times. Over the years, it’s become increasingly heavy on restaurant tenants, in addition to steering anchor and mini anchor spaces away from the traditional department store retailers and over to categories such as beauty with Ulta and grocery in Walmart and Sprouts.
It took a few years for the former JCPenney store there to be bought, but it traded hands last year after sitting empty since 2017. The 102,000-square-foot space was recently acquired for $17.4 million by Newport Beach-based Integral Communities, a residential developer.
Plans now call for the once department store site to be apartments, bringing a more mixed-use view to the mall’s evolution.