Rocklin Gets A New Town Center
With everything a growth market entails, minus a downtown, Rocklin, California, is about to get its much-needed town center.

The city of Rocklin, California, near Sacramento, is a booming market just waiting for a town center to happen. And Mobile Capital is the one to make it so.

Blue Oaks Town Center, located just off Highway 65 at Blue Oaks Boulevard in Rocklin, is being developed by the Los Gatos, California-based company. A fresh firm of just 2 years, Mobile Capital was formed by partners John Aiassa, Michael Smythe and Joe Deaser — all of whom have worked in the real estate development business for 20 years or more. A diversified group, Aiassa was formerly with South Bay Construction & Development and has built in excess of 1.5 million square feet of commercial buildings; Smythe was on the retail side of the business, handling ground-up development for automobile dealerships selling names like Mercedes-Benz and Volvo in the San Francisco Bay Area; and Deaser served as head of development for Northern California with Lincoln Properties and Trammell Crow, where he was responsible for building over 2 million square feet of office, industrial and retail. The first project of the partners' new development company is Blue Oaks Town Center, owned by Rocklin Retail, LLC.

The $80 million, 600,000-square-foot mixed-use project will provide regional shopping, entertainment and dining in an architecturally integrated town center setting adjacent to a new 250,000-square-foot office complex and Rocklin's growing daytime employment base between Blue Oaks Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard. The center has already attracted its main anchor, R.C. Willey, a Salt Lake City-based major furniture, electronics, appliances and flooring retailer. The R.C. Willey facility will feature a 130,000-square-foot showroom and approximately 35,000 square feet of warehouse and support facilities to be built on a 13.5-acre site in the development. Construction is expected to begin in July with the store opening in summer 2006.

“They are a progressive and experienced organization that is owned by the Berkshire Hathaway Company, whose concept is really kind of cool,” notes Aiassa. “What you see, you can either buy and take home, or they deliver the next day. With a growing area like Rocklin/Roseville/Lincoln, where there are 25,000 homes coming on-line, there are a lot of people who want to furnish their homes.”

The center will have a regional draw from Rocklin, Roseville, Lincoln and Antelope, with secondary trade areas of eastern Sutter and southern Yuba County.

“In that area, you have to travel a considerable distance to get to a major outdoor shopping center,” notes Smythe. “We will serve the audience in Lincoln, which is about 4 miles north of us, obviously Rocklin, which doesn't have anything like this, and we will also be able to cater to much of the area around Roseville and Northwest Sacramento.”

The project will cover a half-mile of road frontage and will completely change the landscape of the surrounding area, according to broker Lynn Deveau of Deveau Commercial, who along with Christine Firstenberg of Metrovation has a joint venture listing to handle the project. Deveau Commercial is a boutique brokerage with 18 years of experience in Sacramento, and Metrovation Brokerage focuses primarily on retail real estate in the Bay Area through offices in Oakland.

“The site has some really neat layers of characteristics,” Deveau notes. “It's got 2,000 feet of freeway visibility, sits right on an interchange and is in the middle of an area that's been growing at 10 percent a year for the last 5 years, and is projected to grow at the same rate.”

“The average income up there is more than $75,000 per home, so it's a pretty affluent area,” adds Aiassa. “The schools are good, and they've really planned the area out very well. It's been earmarked as one of the nicest areas to live in the nation.”

In addition to a healthy residential market with 25,000 homes in the approval and construction process within 3 miles of the site, there is 1 million square feet of office space proposed and under construction within 1 mile of the site.

“We're in the middle of the trade area, and the city of Rocklin does not have a downtown or a town center,” Deveau adds. “So we're hoping the project will serve a dual purpose; the site has regional characteristics, and we want to bring some regional tenants to Rocklin, which doesn't, itself, have a large retail base. But at the same time, we want to provide a really nice center to hang out in for those who live and work there.”

In addition to R.C. Willey, Blue Oaks Town Center will have another 30,000 to 40,000 square feet of home decorating and design related stores, according to Deveau.

“We've got a couple of tenants in process for that, and we intend to do about 100,000 square feet of a fashion and promotional tenant mix,” she says.

Additional plans include a specialty grocery store, hotel, athletic club and four family-style dinner houses. A 16-screen Century Theaters is scheduled to open in 2006 directly across the street.

“And we still have a couple of boxes available that I think will serve some everyday needs, like the office supply demand,” adds Deveau.

The center will have an upscale orientation and architectural theme, incorporating decorative, yet natural, elements, such as rock, stack stone and Napa-style lookout towers taken from the wine vineyards and rolling hills in the area. The developers hired MCG Architecture, a national firm, to design the project.

“MCG is a very well respected architectural firm that is known for building and designing unique retail centers,” says Smythe.

Aiassa and Deaser who worked with MCG on various other projects, say they mainly relied on the architectural company's vast client base and quality design.

“They already know what the tenants want when they're designing a center,” he says.

In addition to MCG, Mobile Capital is working with Roseville-based engineering company Omni-Means Ltd and Wells Fargo Bank of Roseville on the project. The partners, along with the city of Rocklin, created a distinct look and feel for the center.

“The project is located at the foothills of the Sierras, and we wanted to have a natural look and feel,” notes Smythe. “It's definitely going to be different from the other shopping centers in the area. Most of the area requires natural colors and more of the warm hues, and we are continuing that. There are several areas in the center where you can sit outside and enjoy the great weather in the spring, summer and fall.”

Though developers stop short of calling the project a lifestyle center, they say it has a nice lifestyle center feel with a combination of big box retail and boutique shops. One side of the center will house the big user(s), while the other side will have the more boutique feel with a high-end grocer and a place for the neighborhood to hang out. The center will also eventually house a permanent leasing/management office for Mobile Capital.

The development is scheduled to break ground in May/June and is slated to open in 2006. According to Aiassa and Smythe, new tenants can be up and running in the project, cost-efficiently, by summer 2006.

“We're right on the border of Rocklin and Roseville, and there are a lot of national tenants that are already in Roseville,” notes Aiassa. “We really consider ourselves a Roseville market, but the cost of doing business in Rocklin — taxes, permits, fees — is probably 30 percent less than Roseville.”

“We have a considerable amount of anchor space and availability in a market that's very hot,” adds Smythe, “and there's not a lot of availability in the market.”

— Susan H. Fishman