Seminole Towne Center, a once tony mall, will soon shutter its doors
The mostly vacant Seminole Towne Center — once billed as a premier mall for well-heeled shoppers in Seminole County — will shutter most of its property by the end of the month, after years of struggling with closed stores and acres of empty parking lots.
Mall owners told the few remaining tenants last month they had until Jan. 31 to vacate the property.
“It’s heartbreaking,” said Asad “Eddie” Hussain, owner of Venetian Jewelers, as he spent most of this week packing merchandise in boxes in preparation to move out to his other store at the Florida Mall. “A lot of my customers have tears in their eyes. We did everything we could to stay in this mall.”
But Hussain, who began working at his family’s store as a teenager in 2005, said he knew the end was near.
“This year, they never brought in Santa Claus. There was no Christmas tree. There was no Christmas music,” he said.
Representatives for Seminole Mall Realty Holdings, which owns most of the roughly 60-acre mall property and 500,000-square-foot building, could not be reached for comment Thursday.
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Removing medical debts from consumer credit reports is expected to increase the credit scores of millions of families by an average of 20 points, the bureau said. The CFPB says its research showed that outstanding health care claims are a poor predictor of someone’s ability to repay a loan yet often are used to deny mortgage applications.
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