The Kansas City Business Journal featured Rouse Frets’ client Legacy Truman, LLC in its March 24, 2017 edition. Truman’s Marketplace was a 2017 winner of the newspaper’s Capstone Awards in the category of Community Impact.
Truman’s Marketplace is the new incarnation of Truman Corners, a 60-year-old retail center built in Grandview, Mo., on the site of the farm where Harry Truman grew up. The shopping center had fallen into blight and vacancy; by 2015, occupancy had fallen to 40 percent. New owners Legacy Development launched an aggressive redevelopment endeavor, and the center reopened as Truman’s Marketplace in September 2016. It is now 96 percent occupied and boasts a variety of national chains, including Starbucks, T.J. Maxx and Petco.
“The biggest challenge was overcoming the way the project looked when we took it over and convincing retailers and restaurants that we could execute on our vision for it,” a Legacy Development spokesman said in the Business Journal article. “It had been in such rundown condition for so many years that it almost became ingrained in everyone’s mind that that’s just the way it was.”
Rouse Frets’ Real Estate team served as counsel for the project; Sean Ervin was lead attorney.