For people who hate crowds, the Galleria in Fort Lauderdale has been a retail oasis. The venerable shopping mall on Sunrise Drive has been in full sunset mode for years after losing many of its best tenants amid a global surge in online shopping. In December, just two weeks before Christmas, shoppers were few and far between at the 1980s-vintage mall. Except for the packed Apple Store and the bustling Capital Grille, the Galleria’s paucity of patrons was reminiscent of the socially distanced days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
New owners want to bring a much bigger buzz to the Galleria. They plan to transform the 31.5-acre shopping mall into a mixed-use property that combines retail space with nearly 3,200 apartments spread across nine towers, each 30 stories tall. To expedite city approval of the mall makeover, the Galleria’s owners intend to designate 40% of the apartments as “workforce housing” units and reserve them for upper middle-income tenants at below-market rents.
Leading the redevelopment effort are Russell Galbut, founder of Miami-based GFO Investments, and Ben Shmul, founder of Fort Lauderdale-based InSite Group. Their companies partnered with two others, Atlas Hill Real Estate and Prime Finance, to buy the Galleria mall last year for $73 million.
Details of Galbut’s and his partners’ plan to redo the Galleria emerged from their application last year to the city government for a development permit. Their application outlines an ambitious plan to build nine towers with 3,144 apartments, most of them with market-rate rents. Within the planned total, 1,273 apartments are designated as workforce housing for tenants earning up to 120% of area median income, or $115,440 a year. In 2025, the median household income in Broward County was $96,200 a year, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Much of the existing mall would remain, so the planned redevelopment would make the Galleria a much denser property. According to their application for site-plan approval and a development permit, the owners intend to keep about 927,000 square feet of existing commercial space at the Galleria and to build not only nine apartment towers, but also a 170-room hotel and about 143,000 square feet of new commercial space for stores, offices and restaurants. The low-rise Galleria now has about a million square feet of commercial space, plus six parking garages and 10 acres of surface-parking lots that surround the property’s retail core like an asphalt moat.
It appears that apartment buildings and new commercial space will replace much of the surface parking along the property’s perimeter. However, it remains to be seen exactly how the mall’s pending transformation will unfold. The Galleria redevelopment looks like a work in progress as awareness of the project spreads among nearby residents and stokes pushback.
“The plan, when it was originally rolled out, seemed like just a general concept of what could go there,” Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis said in an interview. “But as the community has started to weigh in on it, and as we’ve had conversations with the developers, I think they too are unsure what they want. At the beginning, for example, they talked about [approximately] 3,200 rental units. Now they’re talking about 80% of them being condos.”
The mayor acknowledged that the pending redevelopment of the Galleria would proceed under rules set by the Live Local Act, a state law that encourages developers to build mixed-use residential developments where at least 40% of the apartments are designated as workforce housing.
“If the developer submits a project that qualifies [under the Live Local Act], we don’t have the right to say no,” Mayor Trantalis said. But he also said he expects the owners’ redevelopment of the Galleria, as originally conceived, to take as long as 10 years to finish—and to change shape along the way. “It’s an evolving project and will continue to evolve,” he said, “and certainly nothing’s going to happen overnight.”
Like many other South Floridians, Trantalis fondly recalls the Galleria before treasured tenants such as Lord & Taylor, Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue abandoned the mall, leaving two department store chains, Dillard’s and Macy’s, as the mall’s biggest anchors. “When I moved here in the early ’80s, the Galleria was the mall in all of South Florida. Aventura came later.
Town Center came later. There was no Merrick Park,” the mayor said. “It had great stores. But little by little, as ownership changed, they were less interested in the quality of the retail than they were in making a buck. Unfortunately, that became a failure for them, and that’s why they had to unload it.”
According to county property records, the previous owner of the Galleria, Keystone-Florida Property Holdings, sold the mall to the current owners for nearly three times what it paid 33 years ago. Keystone-Florida paid $25.1 million in 1993 to acquire the mall from Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America, a major financial services organization.
Yet it appears the new owners got a good price, too, despite paying an eight-figure price for the sprawling Galleria property, flanked by the Middle River to the west and the Intracoastal Waterway to the east. Their $73 million purchase through a jointly operated company, FLL Galleria Holdings, LLC, looks like a bargain. “These people bought it very cheaply, as real estate goes here in South Florida,” Trantalis said.
Galbut, Shmul and their partners at FLL Galleria Holdings are planning the latest in a series of attempts to revive the Galleria over the years, including an aborted plan to build an aquarium attraction there. During the pandemic, plans for a mixed-use redevelopment of the Galleria with about 1,500 condominiums stalled and never materialized despite public support from two homeowners’ associations in the affluent Coral Ridge area, just north of the mall. “That was the proposal approximately three years ago. … No rentals, all condos and a really nice redesign of the east end of the mall,” said Chris Williams, who serves as president of the Coral Ridge Association, a homeowners’ group.
A lifelong resident of Coral Ridge, Williams remembers the humble strip shopping center that once occupied the Galleria’s location at 2414 East Sunrise Boulevard. “Jordan Marsh had a building on the east end of it, which is now the Dillard’s building. So, Dillard’s owns the pad it’s on. They own their piece of land,” he said. “Then the owners redeveloped everything, added the concourses and tied it all together.”
Williams, an agent with the Williams Group at Re/Max Preferred in Fort Lauderdale, said the latest ownership group acquired the Galleria for a “pretty good price.” However, Williams and his neighbors are concerned about the density of the current plan to redevelop the mall and its impact in Coral Ridge, Victoria Park and other nearby neighborhoods.
Tim Hernandez, president of the Coral Ridge Country Club Estates Community Association, said he and his neighbors are also worried about the impact of the Galleria’s redevelopment on their community. But he also views the planned makeover through the eyes of a real estate developer—and he sees promise in the latest attempt to resuscitate the retail landmark.
Hernandez, a principal at Delray Beach-based real estate development company New Urban Communities, said the new owners paid a very low price for the Galleria property. Assuming $60 million of the $73 million purchase price covered the portion of the property where the owners would build nearly 3,200 residential units, “that’s less than $20,000 a unit,” he said. “That is cheap, cheap, cheap land. That’s a hell of a deal with the [planned number of] units they have.”
In addition, he said the new owners have so many Galleria parking spaces that they may not need to build many more, and they may qualify for a hefty tax break under the Live Local Act. “You can get an abatement of 75% of your property taxes,” he said.
However, among the details missing from the Galleria redevelopment application is whether the workforce-housing apartments would be segregated from or combined with market-rate apartments in the same buildings. Hernandez said he wouldn’t be surprised if the Galleria owners ultimately develop some of the planned residential buildings as condominiums and others as workforce-housing rental apartments.
“The success of the residential is going to drive the success of the project,” Hernandez said. “The reason they bought the property is not for the commercial. It was not to create the next Bal Harbour Shops here, or the next Town Center Mall. It was to create a highly dense residential area—because that’s where the money is in this project.”
Residential buildings have been part of mall redevelopments in other U.S. cities. The same approach doesn’t necessarily work everywhere.
“Unfortunately, it hasn’t been so cookie-cutter,” said Barrie Scardina, executive managing director and head of retail services, Americas, at brokerage firm Cushman & Wakefield. “It hasn’t been, ‘Wow, if you have an empty mall, make it this!’ In some cases, the department store’s space is owned separately from the actual mall. So that creates some challenges.”
But Scardina also said a mall redevelopment can succeed without a residential component, citing Netflix House, an experiential attraction that just opened at the King of Prussia Mall just outside Philadelphia in a former Lord & Taylor store. Created by the world’s most popular video streaming service, the Netflix House at this mall combines a theater with a mini-golf course, restaurants and plenty of selfie-worthy backdrops featuring scenes from Stranger Things and other hit shows. In some metropolitan markets, “there have been some interesting children’s concepts [in mall redevelopment],” Scardina said. For example, “Hasbro has a play concept.”
Developing a sense of community is a driving force behind successful, large-scale retail center redevelopments around the country. Many reimagined retail landmarks “are creating an ambiance that is a magnet for people, whether they’re shoppers or not,” said Glenn Sherman, a real estate attorney and partner at law firm Saul Ewing, which has offices in 18 cities, including Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach.
A common theme in mall and shopping center makeovers is “trying to reconfigure their space to have more outdoor space; more communal space to facilitate community events like farmers’ markets, fitness-type things, music and entertainment. Most developers are trying to incorporate that in some way,” said James Bohnaker, Cushman & Wakefield’s senior economist. “It doesn’t always look the same. But tapping into that aspect of the community has been successful. And it’s something developers are looking to do.”
Andrew Hellinger, for example, developed River Landing Shops & Residences, a mixed-use development along the north bank of the Miami River west of downtown Miami, near a cluster of courthouse buildings and health care facilities. River Landing has 528 rental apartments, 150,000 square feet of office space and 345,000 square feet of retail space. The commercial tenants include a variety of restaurants and a Publix supermarket.
“We felt like we built a city within a city. You don’t have to leave here if you work in the area,” Hellinger said. At River Landing, two 12-story apartment buildings were constructed on top of the property’s 12-story parking garage. The mixed-use property’s residential occupancy rate and its retail occupancy rate are both 98%, Hellinger said. “We do have some vacant office space,” he said. “But that will fill up over time as people recognize that this is a destination that makes employees want to come to work every day.”
A Miami-based developer, Hellinger has ties to Fort Lauderdale-based InSite Group, one of the companies behind the redevelopment of the Galleria mall, and Hellinger believes the project will be successful—in part because Galbut and the rest of the mall’s new owners paid such a low price for the Galleria.
“It was a good acquisition. Russell Galbut is always a good buyer,” Hellinger said. “It’s a perfect location for the developers to sort of duplicate what we did at River Landing and make it a destination venue for different types of shopping, dining and entertainment—plus make it a living area.”
