Moving Forward at PREIT
The past few months have been a truly incredible experience for all of us at PREIT. We have learned a lot about our capabilities and have become much more agile. It’s been approximately 50 days since we started working remotely and ceased mall operations throughout our portfolio. The team has responded by shifting our focus to our communities – our shopper community, our retailer community and our PREIT community of associates.
Even though our malls have been temporarily closed, we have found ways to support our communities and thank the essential personnel who are working hard to keep everyone afloat. Across our portfolio, we have held blood drives, food donation drives, provided meals to our essential workers, and donated much needed protective supplies. We value our communities and our malls continue to serve as a uniting force. Never has it been more evident that our actions have global impact and PREIT is determined to harness this power for the good of our communities. Malls are a vital economic engine in their municipalities and its important that we continue to set an example of positive momentum and collaboration. Read more about our efforts here and here.
Our community is a vast ecosystem consisting of retailers, shoppers, our employees and all other stakeholders. We have continued to support the businesses that were able to remain open through the pandemic through several avenues including social media support highlighting dining establishments and other contactless pickup options at our properties as well as ecommerce platforms for certain retailers. We have developed Shop Local webpages where we have collected and identified the ecommerce sites for all of the small businesses throughout our portfolio. Not only are the offerings highlighted to the local audience but to the entire PREIT portfolio of consumers, leveraging its marketing power for our local business partners. Through our SBA resources page and contact with tenants, we have continued to provide resources to smaller business so they can access the liquidity needed to make it through this challenging time. Cognizant of the fact that our retail partners will need to ramp up quickly, we have added job portals to all of our mall websites so we can collect information to pass along to our retail partners.
As various jurisdictions ease restrictions, we are thoughtfully reopening with safety and well-being of our employees, our tenants and our shoppers being the top priority. We have welcomed shoppers in both North and South Carolina as well as Patrick Henry Mall in Newport News and Valley View Mall in Wisconsin. Springfield Town Center In Virginia will be opening today, followed by Woodland Mall in Michigan, next Monday, June 1st. We are balancing getting our constituents back to work and creating a safe environment, a delicate balance for sure. Our hope is that we will have all of our properties back up and running by the middle of June. Details on what we’re doing and our property reopening schedule can be found at preit.com/recovery.
From what we can tell, our local communities are embracing our efforts. View some local media coverage here:
• Jacksonville Mall opening
• Magnolia Mall opening
From our family to yours, we hope to see you soon.