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Goldridge Group takes struggling commercial properties and gives them new life
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| Existing businesses are open at NorthRidge Center in Chippewa Falls, which has a new exterior look, while construction of a movie theater goes on nearby.
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By Kay Kruse-Stanton
Mid-1990s: The Highland Shopping Center on Highway 53 in Eau Claire has fallen into disrepair; it looks old, and traffic through the complex is on the decline.
Goldridge Group purchases and renovates the property, renaming it the EastRidge Center. Today, it houses a collection of professional and service offices with a good mix of retail outlets. Despite the ups and downs of the economy, occupancy rates have remained consistently high.
Early 2000: The Chippewa Mall in Chippewa Falls has fallen into disrepair; it looks old, and the deterioration has gone beyond reduced traffic. Much of the facility is vacant.
Goldridge Group purchases the property, and begins renovations, which are still underway. A new cinema has targeted a May 1 opening.
Just who are these people who have been successfully resurrecting struggling commercial properties?
At the simplest level, they’re developers — people who see an opportunity to improve a property and realize a profit from that improvement. But Goldridge is also a construction firm, managers who oversee development projects and other construction jobs.
A woman comes down the escalator in the spacious EastRidge Center in Eau Claire, where Goldridge Group keeps its central office.
And Goldridge is a property management group. After the company revives a property, it stays on to manage the venture.
It’s a different approach, according to Scott Rasmussen, the company’s general manager of operations.
“This company buys these properties to put in their portfolio, and that changes the whole mindset when you look at it and work on the properties. You take an ownership,” Rasmussen said.
The EastRidge Center in Eau Claire resulted from the revitalization of the old Highland Mall. It now features a number of retail and office tenants.
“You feel pride when you walk in and out of the facility, because it’s not just a real estate investment. That’s what separates us from a lot of companies that typically invest in mall properties. They’re primarily real estate investors. That’s a great mode of operation; it’s just not ours.”
The Goldridge mode of operation works.
“We’ve had fast growth, and very defined growth,” Rasmussen said. “This company really looks at projects and says, ‘Can we acquire them cost-effectively? Can we do what our vision says we should do, and perform?’ It’s one thing to take an EastRidge and totally put a new face on it, but then you have to get the tenants. You have to fill it. We really look at it to say: Does it fit into what we do?”
The NorthRidge Center in Chippewa Falls was a mostly vacant,
deteriorating strip mall, now being revitalized by Goldridge Group.
The Goldridge portfolio includes SouthRidge Center in Rice Lake, Westridge Center and EastRidge Center in Eau Claire, the Oakwood Office Building in Eau Claire, several hotels and other commercial buildings in the Upper Midwest, and the company’s project that has been capturing headlines lately — the former Chippewa Mall in Chippewa Falls.
Representatives of Goldridge Group and its subcontractors have worked closely with Jayson Smith, the city of Chippewa Falls planner, throughout the long process of evaluating the property, working out purchasing contracts, and turning a tired mall into an attraction the city can be proud of.
“The old Chippewa Mall had basically no activity, practically, for many years,” Smith said. “The overwhelming square footage of the site was vacant.”
Goldridge Group representatives decided the mall was the type of property they could revive, and talked to Smith about their plans. He was impressed.
“They’ve been good to work with. They did a great job in that they know how to do what they do,” he said.
The company thought long and hard before deciding to purchase the property. In the end, Goldridge’s decision to improve the site boiled down to the time-proven test of the ultimate value of real estate: location, location, location.
The company has looked at sites in many communities, and often decides against investing in a property. In one case, for example, traffic had long ago abandoned the location.
“We look at a project like that and say even if we could sprinkle magic dust on it, we probably aren’t ever going to bring the people back there,” Rasmussen said.
And for a time, Goldridge Group wondered if the Chippewa Mall property would fall into that category.
“We dragged our feet a bit to see how Highway 29 was going to influence traffic patterns,” Rasmussen said. “When we were convinced that Highway 124 was going to continue to be a main gateway into Chippewa Falls, that project really began to show up on our radar. We thought that project had great potential. Traffic was still going by that property in great volumes, and all we had to do was find the combination that would give it new life and create some synergy.”
In short, Goldridge Group had to find a combination of uses for the property that would get people to turn off the roadway and visit the place.
“In our vision of the Chippewa Mall, we said that if the project was going to be successful and create some synergy, it needed a theater,” Rasmussen said. “You get in Chippewa Falls, and there’s not a theater. Who effectively services Stanley, and Boyd, and Bloomer? That’s an untapped theater market that will draw the people to the property.
“And once you create synergy, once you draw the people, the rest of it happens fairly quickly. Once people come to those movies in the evening, you will find a restaurant that wants to be there. It’s almost a success that grows onto itself.”
There’s another factor that determines whether a project will be successful, Rasmussen said, and that’s the support of the community. It’s more than just financial incentives, he said. Chippewa Falls had a Tax Incremental District in place, and that helped the Chippewa Mall project proceed. But beyond that, the city wanted the property renovated, Rasmussen said.
The property had deteriorated, Smith said; deteriorated buildings not only shadow the positive image a thriving community hopes to project, they bring in fewer property tax dollars. The city could only benefit from having the property improved.
“In the case of the Chippewa Mall, the city absolutely wanted the project,” Rasmussen said. “The city was committed. If the city wants its mall, the mall will be successful. When you have buy-in by all parties, you do a great service to the community.”
Rasmussen says the owners of Goldridge Group, Steve Stamm and Jerry Koehn, have a “gift” for looking at a piece of deteriorating property and envisioning it as an asset to the community — and the company’s portfolio.
Koehn says it’s just good business.
“I don’t know that there’s anything magic about it,” he said. “You have to take a look at buildings, period. I think there is a value in any building. You try to identify the user for that building. Does the project make financial sense? Is there a user who will pay for that space? You need to really transform these old deteriorated centers into something up-to-date. They have to feel like today.”
And that means more than putting down new carpeting and slapping on a coat of paint, Koehn said.
“Ten, 15 years ago, it was acceptable to have buildings with just ‘X’ number of air changes an hour. Today that doesn’t work,” he said. “People today are more critical than that. They want fresh air. Landscaping in parking lots. Fifteen years ago it was great to pave everything. Today we want a little green, even though it’s hard to plow around it.”
When Goldridge Group purchases a property and renovates it, the company is making a commitment to continue to work on the property, to keep it looking current, Koehn said.
“Absolutely,” he said. “As a building owner you have to evaluate that building every so often, or the value of your property goes down. You go through the cycle again, until somebody else sees that the building is empty and thinks, ‘I could buy that building. I could turn that building around.’ ”
Even as crews work to finish the Chippewa Mall — make that NorthRidge — project, Goldridge Group is discussing what updates will be needed at the EastRidge Center, Rasmussen said.
“That’s part of the process,” he said. “Does that mean we’ll update it tomorrow? No, but we’re planning on it for the future. That’s driven by curb appeal. When you sense you’ve lost curb appeal, that’s too late. You have to fix it before you lose it. That way, when your major tenants come up for renewal, they’ll decide to stay.”
The construction arm of Goldridge Group will be plenty busy even when the NorthRidge project is finished. Goldridge Group is in the planning stages for another major project for the Chippewa Valley, one Koehn and Rasmussen aren’t ready to talk about just now. Not much, anyway. The project will be constructed on land next to the Eau Claire Health and Country Club.
“We’ve made a commitment to the club that it will be a project that they will be proud to have adjacent to them and we’ve also said it will be a project that will be very different for Eau Claire,” Koehn said. “Eau Claire has not seen a project like this.”
Goldridge Group plans to “turn some dirt on this project this summer,” Koehn said. Stay tuned. Both Rasmussen and Koehn say they believe the project will be a good addition to the Chippewa Valley and another success for the company. Success, Rasmussen says, is determined by the flow of the entire project, not just the end result.
“Success — when you can step back at the end of the day and say we all went in with a commitment, we all bought into the project, including the community, and we can say it worked. It was a good deal for everybody,” he said. “That really determines our success.”
Kay Kruse-Stanton is a freelance writer from Menomonie. Contact the Chippewa Valley Business Report at (715) 723-5515, or through www.chippewavalleybusinessreport.com.
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