Dave & Busters and Dick’s House of Sport are the most recent businesses coming to the Annapolis Mall this winter, with more expected.

Retail real estate company Centennial acquired the mall along with Atlas Hill Real Estate and others in September for $160 million, according to a 2024 earnings report from former owner Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield.

“It is a very productive center, and I think that’s one reason that it was attractive to us,” said Paul Kurzawa, Centennial president. “It’s not a dying mall by any stretch of the imagination, and the amount of potential that it has is what got us excited.”

Typically, Centennial, which operates across 18 states, takes tired enclosed shopping centers and revitalizes them, but with the acquisition of the Annapolis Mall, it is building on pre-established success.

Annapolis Mall is located in a high-income region and is the only enclosed mall within a 25-mile radius.

“Those two things together with the fact that the shopping center is primed right now, in this moment, for a new story, gives way to a tremendous amount of opportunity there,” he said.

Kurzawa says a third anchor tenant is in the works, although he declined to specify which one. An anchor tenant is typically a well-known brand and can be key to a mall’s success.

“Malls usually rely on anchor stores to help attract foot traffic, and then the other retail tenants would benefit from the spillover traffic inside the shopping mall,” said Jie Zhang, professor of marketing at the University of Maryland. “So, when anchor stores are not doing well, malls certainly suffer. But it’s not just the anchor stores, the department stores, but other primarily mall-based retailers, are losing out to online retailers.”

She said these places have also lost market share to big-box discount retailers like Target or Walmart, which tend not to be located in malls.

A recent walk through the Annapolis Mall shows more than a handful of empty smaller storefronts, but Kurzawa said he was not worried about the vacancies. Some retailers may have come to the end of their leases, while others may no longer be relevant to the Annapolis market, he said. Regardless, Kurzawa said these vacancies present a strategic opportunity for the new ownership.

“As we look at re-merchandising the shopping center, as that evolution occurs, it’s very typical in our business that there’s a period of time where you may see some additional vacancies as our leasing and development teams work on backfilling those with the right tenants and the right brands that we want to bring into the shopping center,” he said. “What you’re seeing is the cocoon of the butterfly that will eventually [hatch].”

The mall uses one popular method to change with the times, bringing in non-retail tenants, like an Anne Arundel County Public Library branch. According to Zhang, health clinics, community centers, and offices often can also be mall tenants.

However, non-retail tenants come with their own issues. She said mall-tenant rental agreements often include a commission, but when a tenant is something like a library that does not sell anything, there is no commission.

Kurzawa said the secret sauce to keeping malls open is reinvestment. He feels malls should be aggressive in finding new tenants, giving customers a reason to return, and offering new things to discover.

“When you start conveying what we want to do with the property to new potential tenants and brands, they fall in love with it, and they want to be a part of it,” he said.

Have a news tip? Contact Benjamin Rothstein at brothstein@baltsun.com, 443-928-1926.