An Atlanta developer’s plan to transform the once-thriving Seminole Towne Center has lined up its first retailer, with Costco under contract to buy a portion of the property and build a new store there.

Costco Wholesale recently submitted plans to the City of Sanford calling for a 156,454-square-foot membership warehouse store, 847 parking spaces, and a gas station to replace the former Macy’s building and a parking lot south of the mall, according to a report in GrowthSpotter. JP Andrews, Director of Real Estate Development at Costco, confirmed that the company is under contract to purchase the parcel from The Ardent Companies, which bought the shuttered mall property in March.

“We are under contract here, so we’re working on a certain timeline. I need to have a budget together and present it to our CEO in August to be able to move this project forward,” Andrews said during a pre-application meeting on Tuesday with Sanford staff. “We are presenting a pretty conceptual plan here, understanding that there’s going to be some massaging of this based on the city requirements and all of that. What you’re seeing here is pretty much a prototype footprint of one of our buildings.”

Ardent now owns the vacant, 324,681-square-foot enclosed regional mall, the 160,000-square-foot former Macy’s building that has been vacant since 2020, and the parking lot south of the Macy’s. While Ardent hasn’t revealed any specifics besides the planned Costco store, the developer aims to redevelop the site with multifamily, hotel, and retail uses.

The mall’s main retail anchor businesses such as JCPenney, Elev8 Fun, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and Dillard’s will remain open on separate parcels that weren’t part of Ardent’s recent purchase. However, the rest of the mall, which permanently shut down in January, is set to be demolished and redeveloped.

“We’re working with Ardent on their master plan and what they have going for the project. The goal of our project is that Costco would go first before they would start any of their master planning,” Edward McDonald, Principal at Thomas Engineering Group, said during the meeting.

According to McDonald, the gas station would be situated south of the planned Costco to keep it as far away from the rest of the mall property as possible.

Multiple developers have tried and failed in recent years to redevelop the former Macy’s and the adjacent parking lot. Boca Raton-based The Altman Companies was previously under contract to purchase the parcel, with plans to build a 354-unit apartment community. However, the developer backed out of the deal in 2022. Shortly after, Picerne Real Estate Group filed plans for a 350-unit apartment community at the same site, but that project never moved forward.

The mall had also switched ownership multiple times prior to Ardent’s purchase.

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