Willow Grove Park Mall is on track to be sold soon.
A representative for Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust (PREIT), which owns the Montgomery County mall, said in a statement Thursday that “a lender-directed sale process is underway and expected to be completed in the near term.”
The Philadelphia Business Journal first reported the news, saying that a partnership of New York firms — Namdar Realty Group, Mason Asset Management, and CH Capital Group — were set to buy PREIT’s 725,000-square-foot section of the 1.2 million-square-foot mall, as well as its debt on the property, for an undisclosed price.
The sale would include most of the mall, including Macy’s, Cheesecake Factory, and Nordstrom Rack, but not parcels that house Primark and Bloomingdale’s, according to the Journal, citing marketing materials that have since been removed from real estate firm JLL’s website. JLL did not return a request for comment.
The potential new buyers, all based in New York, did not return calls or emails from The Inquirer.
Willow Grove Park Mall would not be their first acquisition in the region.
In 2015, Namdar, a company known to scoop up distressed malls, and Mason Asset Management bought the struggling Voorhees Town Center from PREIT for $13.4 million. Since then, retailers have continued to flee the Camden County mall, which has been closed since a 2024 fire. A North Jersey developer has plans to buy and revive the property, pending a state tax credit.
Namdar also owns the Hamilton Mall in Mays Landing, which New Jerseyans have called one of the state’s deadest malls.
The situation in Montgomery County, however, is different.
Willow Grove Park Mall has appeared healthy in recent years, despite the financial struggles of its owner, PREIT. As of 2023, the center was about 96% occupied, and PREIT executives were calling the complex .”
The Willow Grove Park Mall opened in 1982 at a time when the Philadelphia suburbs were flush with shopping malls. The complex got off to a bumpy start, failing to meet its first-year sales expectations and leading some mall developers to say, as an Inquirer headline read at the time: “No more malls.”
PREIT has had a stake in Willow Grove Park Mall since 2000, when it and the Pennsylvania State Employees’ Retirement System signed on to buy the center for $140 million.
PREIT has filed for bankruptcy twice since the pandemic, emerging most recently in April 2024 with $800 million less in debt and a goal to redevelop some of its underperforming properties.
PREIT’s local mall holdings run from the gamut from the bustling Cherry Hill Mall to Willow Grove Park to Moorestown Mall, which has been undergoing a mixed-use makeover.
The company also owns the Plymouth Meeting Mall, one of many properties that longtime real estate investor Dean Adler has plans to redevelop.
PREIT sold the troubled Exton Square Mall to Abrams Realty & Development for $34 million in 2025. The new owners have been mired in a legal dispute with local officials over the redevelopment of the mall, which closed its doors in June.