🔒‘Bringing back’ the Bangor mall: Developers target retail reboot

Standing guard at the Mainiac Manor haunted attraction inside the Bangor Mall, the Grim Reaper and other decorative spooks far outnumber live human shoppers on a late July weekday morning.

The ghost-town ambiance extends to clusters of empty chairs and tables inside the concourse, no more than a handful of people strolling in and out of the few places open for business — including a JCPenney department store, the Dragon’s Lair games arcade and a Dick’s Sporting Goods — in a 600,000-plus square-foot plaza that’s only 30% occupied.

With malls and their traditional anchor stores taking a hit nationwide, why not demolish the 48-year-old structure and build something new from scratch?

“You would be tearing down a perfectly good building,” says Michael Cole, a Bangor-based real estate broker who’s leading a local group formed to buy and repurpose the Bangor Mall into a mixed-use hub anchored by retail and services. Other partners in Cole’s venture, called Bangor Marketplaces and Residences LLC, include Hampden-based developer David St. Germain of Sky Villa LLC and Nick Mullins, owner of Community Real Estate Solutions.

Originally aiming to transform the former Sears into housing for an estimated more than $40 million, the group has put that plan on hold to first build up retail and entertainment.

“Right now,” Cole says, “our focus is going to be on filling the space we have and recreating and bringing back what the mall was.”

With plans to finalize their purchase from Great Neck, N.Y.-based Namdar Realty Group this September to put the state’s only regional mall in local hands, the prospective buyers are giving themselves a relatively short timeline to complete the transformation. They plan to start with landscaping and other cosmetic fixes.

“As soon as we own it, we’re going to hit the ground running,” Cole predicts. “It’s all about what it feels like.”

But the turnaround plan goes well beyond aesthetics, with a goal of achieving 92% occupancy in three years, according to Mullins: “We’ll get there,” he says.

‘Patient capital’

While the Bangor Mall’s incoming owners have disclosed neither the agreed purchase price nor the estimated investment, mall conversions elsewhere have cost hundreds of millions and often take several business cycles to complete, notes Tuck O’Brien, president and CEO of Portland commercial property management and development firm J.B. Brown & Sons.

“You need some pretty patient capital,” he says, pointing to projects like Assembly Row outside of Boston or the redevelopment of Thompson’s Point and Bayside in Portland as examples of projects that have all taken time from initial planning and concept to the first shovels in the ground. Even with success stories like University Place in North Carolina, he says, developers have had to pause between phases.

“The question is, how to translate something that works with the demographics and economy of a place like Chapel Hill, N.C., to a city like Bangor with its particular strengths and weaknesses,” he says.

O’Brien, who has no involvement in the Bangor project but is familiar with the property from his former role as head of the Maine Redevelopment Land Bank Authority, is optimistic the mall will be able to turn the corner with new investment and ownership.

“The transformation will take someone with a long-term vision and patience,” he says.

Portfolio shift

When the Bangor Mall opened in October 1978, the “Halloween” slasher flick and “The Wiz” musical featuring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson were playing in cinemas, the Bee Gees and Foreigner were all the rage and Hershey’s Reese’s Pieces were brand new.

Built on a former dairy farm north of Bangor’s central business district close to Interstate 95, the Bangor Mall opened with Sears and JCPenney as anchor tenants – fixtures of American shopping malls well through their heyday in the 1980s. Over the next couple of decades malls began to lose their luster, with the rise of online shopping leading to store closures and bankruptcies. By the time the pandemic hit in 2020, when ecommerce really took off, the Bangor Sears had already been closed for a couple of years.

Namdar Realty Group teamed with two other companies in 2019 to buy the Bangor Mall at auction for $12.6 million from Simon Property Group, the Indiana-based owner of Kittery Premium Outlets. Today, the Bangor Mall is one of 377 Namdar properties in 37 states but no longer of interest as the group focuses on larger markets with critical mass.

“Their plan all along was to hold it for a couple of years to try to reposition it,” says T.C. Haffenreffer IV, a broker and partner with the Dunham Group, a Portland-based commercial real estate agency, representing Namdar in the pending sale.

“They wanted to make sure that it transitioned to somebody who could complete the project, and feel that Michael Cole and his team have the right vision for the property,” he adds. Getting an approach from local buyers also came at the right time, he notes. Representatives of Namdar declined to comment for this article.

Cole declined to say whether the group has agreed to buy the mall for more or less than what Namdar paid in 2019. Negotiations began last fall, leading to an agreement signed in April. Following an extended period of due diligence, the transaction is expected to close in September.

Conversion wave

As the traditional retail model loses its luster, up to 87% of large shopping malls could close over the next decade, according to a June report by Capital One Shopping Research using publicly available data. Of the estimated 1,200 malls of all sizes operating nationwide in 2023, as few as 900 could remain by 2028, the report predicted. The trend is already reflected in store closures, with a net 14,610 mall stores shutting their doors between 2016 and 2025.

Shopping malls are also twice as likely to be vacant as other retail space, with closed malls remaining empty for nearly four years on average. In the first quarter of 2026, the average nationwide mall vacancy rate was nearly double the overall retail vacancy rate.

Some malls are finding new life through redevelopment, including examples in Massachusetts cited by Daniel Amodeo, president of Amo Realty in Boston. They include CambridgeSide for “embracing life sciences and mixed-use development while maintaining retail,” and Assembly Row in Somerville for “showing how a former retail and industrial site can become an entire neighborhood for people to live, work, shop, dine and gather.” Both are in suburban Boston.

“The most successful mall developments don’t eliminate retail — they reduce their dependence on retail,” Amodeo says. “By adding housing, offices, restaurants, entertainment and other uses, these properties generate activity throughout the day instead of relying almost entirely on weekend shoppers.”

Cole and his partners have a similar long-term goal in Bangor, where five times more people commute from elsewhere for work than the other way around, according to U.S. Census data. Census estimates also show the population edging up 2% between 2020 and 2025, to 32,518.

From rezoning to redevelopment

To lay the groundwork for redevelopment of the Bangor Mall, the city has spent the past five years tweaking zoning rules to allow everything from residential and commercial uses to industrial development on the property.

“We looked at the building and its incredible location to the highway and knew that a host of uses would be appropriate for the site,” says Anne Krieg, the city’s economic development director. “We really wanted to have options that would be viable.”

But the city’s push to reshape the property comes amid tensions with Namdar over alleged code violations, taking the owner to task in two separate lawsuits that are still pending. While Namdar has made some repairs in response to court orders, Krieg notes that the company still owes $1.15 million in court-ordered penalties.

In an attempt to speed redevelopment of the Bangor Mall into affordable housing, state Sen. Joe Baldacci, D-Bangor, last year introduced a bill that would have allowed the state to seize the mall through eminent domain, which empowers the government to take private property for public use, subject to constitutional limits.

The final version of the law, which took effect in June 2025 without the governor’s signature, directed the Maine Redevelopment Land Bank Authority to work with the city on a revitalization plan.

Once the pending sale is finalized, Krieg says, the city will coordinate with Cole and his partners to help advance their plans for the property.

“We will work with the new owner on necessary approvals and improvements and are committed to assisting them in any way possible to have a successful development,” she says.

What’s in store

While Cole is mum about exactly what will go into his plans, he promises there will be plenty of entertainment options designed to attract visitors from as far away as Canada. The group has already signed agreements with national retailers whose names he can’t yet disclose. In due course, he expects to put new signage up with known businesses.

“It will have that outlet mall look to it, but it won’t be an outlet store per se,” he says. “It’s going to be a lot of familiar names.”

As he takes on the transformation, Cole says the toughest part will be overcoming public perception and “breaking through the negativity” from critics who say it’s never going to happen.

“If you want it to be great, it’s going to be great. If you want it to be bad, you’ll find ‘bad’ every day,” he says. “But I’m assembling a solid team and we’ll find out how to make it happen. I do puzzles backwards … It’s one bit at a time.”

While holding off on residential development for now, Cole says the long-term plan may include hotels and condos “when the time is right and when it’s financially viable,” but only once the mall has a critical mass of retail and entertainment. “This is the right choice, not just financially but also functionally,” he says. “You don’t want to build a place for people to live before you build the things they want to live around. This is the right way to do it.”

He also expects the development to draw visitors from as far as two hours away, while underscoring that the perks are being designed mainly with local residents in mind.

“Some of the things that we’re planning, I know there isn’t anything like it within 150 miles,” he says.

Upward bound

As the team lines up new retail tenants, the plan is to maintain existing ones who would pay a higher rent amid the planned upgrades. The developers will also be selective in choosing who comes in.

“We’re not going to let just anybody in there because we are going to elevate the space,” Cole says. “It’s not going to be a yard sale.”

Expecting to run out of space quickly, the team is already thinking about further expansion. Though there are limits at ground level, they have “a lot of acreage” to build upwards, Mullins says. In other words, the sky is the limit.