Recruitment fair to be held in April
By NELSY RODRIGUEZ - Staff Writer | Friday, April 3, 2009

MURRIETA ---- The long-anticipated SuperTarget at The Orchard shopping center is scheduled to open in less than four months, a spokeswoman for the giant retailer said earlier this week.

The 179,862-square-foot building will offer everything from home goods, clothing, toys and beauty products to groceries, pharmaceuticals, bakery and deli items.

The doors to the store are expected to open July 26, said Anna Anderson, a spokeswoman for the company.

A hiring fair will be held in mid-April as the company looks to hire between 200 and 300 people to work at the store, which sits north of Clinton Keith Road and west of Interstate 215, she said. Details on the job fair have not been released, but Anderson said signs will be posted announcing a location and time.

The store is expected to contribute about $1.5 million in sales tax to the city annually. A Marshall's clothing store and a Walgreens drugstore also are slated for the shopping center.

Currently, the 460,000-square-foot center includes a juice joint, coffee house, nail salon, sandwich shop, yogurt hut, bank and lumber/home improvement store.

The SuperTarget will be the second in Southwest County ---- the first opened in October in Menifee ---- and will be the second Target in Murrieta.

Allan Davis, president of the development company Retail Development Advisors, says he has leases signed for another 100,000 square feet of space. He did not list the tenants who have signed on for that space, however.

While plans are moving forward at the northern-most shopping center in the city, Davis said progress has not come easy. He said tenants have had an increasingly difficult time finding financing options. Financing has gotten so thin, he said, that he is in partnership with Walgreens to back its opening there.

"What (bankers) say and reality are two different things," Davis said of recent comments made by the heads of major banking institutions that loans are available. "We're trying very diligently to finance and it's very difficult, if not impossible. We're building that (Walgreens) cash out of pocket."

While The Orchard is progressing, other centers in the city have struggled.

Village Walk Plaza off Kalmia Street and Murrieta Spectrum off Madison Avenue have lost numerous tenants, including national chain stores. Home Center Murrieta, a shopping center of Los Alamos Road known as "furniture row," also has suffered as demand for home goods has slowed.

Bruce Coleman, Murrieta's director of economic development, said a center's viability during rough economic times can depend on the tenants it keeps.

In situations where a center is flooded with multiple businesses offering the same types of products, such as furniture or electronics, businesses there are less able to cope with trying times as disinterest for one product affects the entire center.

But centers with varied tenants ---- and, more importantly, a major anchor store ---- are better able to deal with a decrease in shoppers because they offer more options, he said.

"It really tends to be the tenant mix more than anything else," Coleman said of what it takes to keep a center alive during a recession.

Coleman said the partnership through which the Walgreens is being built is "an extraordinary situation."

Davis said he believes his center should weather the storm because most of the tenants offer discounted and necessary items. He also said the SuperTarget stands to benefit when traffic circulation improves in the area. City officials have said they're close to kicking off construction on a project that would widen the Clinton Keith Road bridge.

"Access is always important because people go toward the path of least resistance, and tenant mix is critically important," Davis said. "You put all that mix together and that's how you succeed."

Contact staff writer Nelsy Rodriguez at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2626, or nrodriguez@californian.com.