Nearly Abandoned Mall Outside Vegas Soon to Have Only One Tenant

Only two stores are left open at the Primm Mall, 40 miles southwest of the Las Vegas Strip. And one of them is about to close.

When national designer clothing chain Michael Kors shuts up shop there on or around March 25 — according to a source who asked not to be named — that will leave only one store left.

Sanithrift is a local thrift store with another location in the Galleria Mall in Henderson, Nev. It’s open only four days a week.

The Primm Mall opened as the Fashion Outlets of Las Vegas on July 16, 1998, near the California border in Primm, Nev. Nearly everyone traveling by car to Las Vegas on Interstate 15 from L.A. has seen it since.

Over the past 15 years, however, very few of them have bothered stopping there.

Mall Bets are Off

Developed at a cost of $75 million by TrizecHahn Corp. with Gordon Group Holdings, the 371,000 square-foot shopping center opened with high-end retailers Neiman Marcus and Polo, and 10 food court restaurants.

At first, business was slow. Though TrizecHahn had estimated 10-12 million annual visitors, only 1.5 million materialized. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Bertolini’s Italian restaurant was sued for breach of contract by the mall’s original owners when it evacuated its 6K square-foot space in the middle of the night in April 1999.

But by 2001, at least according to the R-J, the mall found its footing, leasing out most of its space and enjoying a high sales per square foot of $426.

That didn’t last. Because of competition from online retailers, as well as from the Las Vegas South Premium Outlets, a mall less than 3 miles from the Strip, tenant occupancy began dwindling in the 2010s.

In 2012, the Primm Mall took out a $73 million mortgage along with a $32 million loan from Brookfield Asset Management. That allowed Brookfield to foreclose and take ownership in 2016. Ownership was transferred to the mortgage holder, Rialto Capital Management, two years later.

As stores began closing without replacements, the mall’s operators did their best to cover up the vacancies with dazzling works of street-inspired art. But by early 2020, there was no covering up the fact that the mall, briefly and futilely renamed Prizm Outlets to attract young people, was only 66% occupied.

Long Island-based Kohan Retail Investment Group, headed by Michael Kohan, purchased the mall in 2021 for a song: just north of $1.5 million.

After the pandemic shutdown, only six or seven stores in the mall reopened. No food court restaurants did.

Though Michael Kors still lists its Primm store on its own website, the Primm Mall website doesn’t list a single tenant anymore. Even though its logo still advertises “shopping * art * dining,” only the mall’s “127 murals from artists around the world” are mentioned.

An employee at Michael Kors told Casino.org she doesn’t know her store’s official closing date, referring all questions to a mall manager. That manager said she didn’t know.

Casino.org asked Michael Kohan what his future plans were for the 317,000 square-foot indoor mall in the desert that he must pay to air-condition and heat for the benefit of its one or two remaining stores.

Kohan declined to comment and hung up.