Home Depot plans three new East Bay stores on Home Services

Jan

Home Depot plans three new East Bay stores

posted by admin in Home Depot

Though homes arent being built or sold at levels seen in past years, hurting some home merchandise retailers, the worlds largest home improvement retailer is still doing a robust business in opening new stores around the greater East Bay and nationwide.

In coming months, Home Depot Inc. is slated to build new stores in Vallejo and Pleasanton - the retailers second locations in each of those cities - and its first-ever store in Oakley, the rapidly growing east Contra Costa County bedroom community.

Sam Finne, senior vice president in the Walnut Creek office of Terranomics Retail Services of Burlingame, said the Vallejo store has already been approved by city officials, while the Oakley and Pleasanton stores are still awaiting the go-ahead.

Last month, the mammoth retailer with 2,150 stores throughout North America, opened its first Home Depot Design Center format store at the Concord site of the former EXPO Design Center, a more upscale division of Home Depot that has been shrinking in size over the past few years.

With fewer tools and more elaborate displays of kitchens and bathrooms, the Home Depot Design Center is, according to company officials, an effort to appeal to larger numbers of female shoppers.

The new Oakley store, at the corner of Main Street and Live Oak Avenue, is being built in an area where new home construction is still occurring. The Pleasanton store, planned for a new shopping center at Bernal Avenue and Stanley Boulevard, will be in an affluent community less affected by the mortgage crisis hitting home buyers of more modest means.

Both stores are planned to be 106,000 square feet in size with 34,000-square-foot garden centers, according to Finne. He and colleague Patrick McGaughey, a vice president at Terranomics, represented Home Depot in negotiating the new store locations in Vallejo, Oakley and Pleasanton.

Barbara Mason, redevelopment/economic development director for Oakley, said Home Depot has submitted a development application to build the store in her city, which welcomes retail development. For years, residents have had to travel to stores in the nearby cities of Brentwood, Antioch and Pittsburg.

A Home Depot representative did not respond to questions about the new stores by press time. According to the company Web site, Home Depot has opened 65 new stores nationwide between May and November this year. This includes new Bay Area stores in San Jose, Concord and San Rafael,

While the Pleasanton and Oakley stores will be built from the ground up, the second Vallejo Home Depot store will occupy a former Wal-Mart store, abandoned in September when Wal-Mart Stores Inc. opened a controversial, long-awaited 187,000-square-foot supercenter a few miles up the road in the Napa County community of American Canyon.

Supercenters are larger than typical Wal-Mart stores, combining general merchandise with full supermarkets.

They have proven so divisive in some communities - due to concerns over their size, traffic congestion, employee wages and crime because many are open 24 hours a day - that many greater East Bay cities have enacted ordinances to keep them out or have rejected specific supercenter proposals.

Ironically, Wal-Mart is negotiating with Vallejo - which has an ordinance forbidding the sale of food and pharmacy items in a store larger than 75,000 square feet - to build a supercenter on the site of a former Kmart store on Sonoma Boulevard, according to Susan McCue, the citys economic development program manager. It will have to undergo both economic and environmental impact studies, she added.