Long vacant Delran shopping plaza gets new owner

The once-thriving but long-vacant shopping plaza in Delran that once housed a Sam's Club wholesale discount store has been sold and expects to sign tenants soon, its new owner said.

Sun Equity Partners, based in Lakewood, Ocean County, acquired the Route 130 property from Vornado Realty Trust last week, Sun's acquisitions director, Abe Tress, said Friday.

"We're in talks with large retailers," said Tress, who declined to name them "because we haven't signed them." His four-year-old firm specializes in distressed properties like the Delran site, he said, which has been largely unused for a decade.

"We paid $5.25 million, but we're going to invest $10 million to make a class shopping center," Tress said.

Prospective tenants will be attracted by its great frontage at the northwest corner of Route 130 and Chester Avenue, he said, and by the high volume of traffic along the corridor. "A lot of good guys and banks want to be in there."

Tress said he hoped to start construction within six months.

Delran Mayor Ken Paris said Sun told him it was looking at all options, including big-box stores, that would take over the site.

The shopping center was the township's ninth-largest taxpayer when the Sam's Club relocated, paying about $165,000 in taxes annually.

Paris and Township Administrator Jeff Hatcher could not immediately say how much the town had collected in recent years from the site.

Tress said the interior floor space of the white, L-shaped building - which once also housed a Staples office supply store and a Chinese restaurant - is 168,000 square feet.

Only a Wendy's restaurant, which stands apart from the main structure, is still in business on the property.

The Chinese restaurant and Staples lost business after Sam's Club departed in 2003 and eventually also left, according to Tress, who described the site as "impeccably maintained" by Vornado since.

Vornado, based in Manhattan, did not return a request for comment.

Sam's Club, a subsidiary of the Walmart chain, moved into the center in 1989. Ten years later, it announced it was looking for another property that would enable it to sell meats and fresh-baked goods, which it said it could not do at the Delran location.

In January 2003, it moved to a new shopping plaza at Andover Road and Route 130 in Cinnaminson, which it now shares with a Walmart and other retail stores.

About the same time, even as Delran lost Sam's Club, some new businesses moved to town: A Lowe's home center and a ShopRite supermarket broke ground on Route 130, after a Home Depot, all a few miles north of the site the Sam's Club vacated.