By Kirk Kern
When Billy Bayne bought the Village Square Mall in December, he liked that the center wasn’t very susceptible to Amazon’s assault on brick and mortar retailers. It had a fair amount of office space and was a bit more geared toward entertainment and dining with a movie theater as the anchor tenant.
The first few months of 2020 were as expected. Then March came around. The coronavirus pandemic forced the shutdown of almost the whole center. The theater still hasn’t opened.
But Bayne isn’t panicking just yet. He and his partners weren’t overly leveraged when they bought the property and knew even at the beginning that if they lost a big tenant they would be OK. They had collected all the rent for March at the beginning of the month, so there wasn’t the impact that many businesses felt right away.
They started meeting with tenants to come up with plans to help them get through the crisis. In some cases, stores and restaurants didn’t have to completely close, so they were able to collect about 22 percent of the rents due. They also negotiated with the closed businesses to defer rent payments and just add extra months onto the end of their leases.
“We’ve been going case-by-case with tenants to come up with a good solution,” Bayne said.
More stores and restaurants opened in May, so rent payments increased a bit. Some businesses, like Pro Cyclery, have thrived with a big increase in business. Other’s like Kinderland, which offers a an indoor gym for children, have yet to re-open and may find a hard time getting approval to resume business with social distancing requirements.
Viva Mercado restaurant will open this weekend, but Burgundy French Bakery and Cafe and Korean BBQ Yakga are still waiting on approval to open from the health department.
The movie theater is slated to re-open on July 1.
“We really want work with our tenants,” Bayne said. “We believe they’re more like our business partners. We could take a hard line and as soon as governors orders are lifted we can evict if you don’t pay full rent, but that’s not who we are.”
While Bayne is looking out for all his tenants, he is especially concerned about the restaurants living within the restrictions of a maximum 50 percent occupancy. He knows from which he speaks as he is also a restaurant owner himself, having purchased the long-standing Farm Basket restaurant on Charleston Boulevard in 2018.
“That business has thrived because the food is good and we have a drive-though,” he said. “it’s very neighborhood-oriented, but people are willing to drive a little further right now to get something different as well.”
At restaurants such as Archi’s Thai in Village Square, however, while take-out and delivery are up, it doesn’t make up for the huge decline in dine-in revenue. Also, delivery services such as GrubHub, Uber Eats and Postmates take a large percentage of the revenue off the gross.
“That’s a huge impact on restaurants,” he said. “I’m nervous on how they’re going to make it. 50 percent capacity restaurant just flat doesn’t work.”