Bucking the trend of dying or struggling Toledo area shopping malls, Bowling Green’s Woodland Mall broke ground on a major expansion this week.

The 38,000-square-foot addition is designed to accommodate a waiting list of tenants and will mix traditional mall space with a trendy open-air shopping experience. The project, which includes the construction of two freestanding buildings on some of the mall’s grassy property near the front entrance, is set for completion next spring.

While Toledo’s Lakeside Centre — formally North Towne Square — closed Monday and the city’s Southwyck Shopping Center continues to struggle for survival, Woodland Mall’s newest owner is matching success to the confidence he showed when he purchased the property in June for $4 million.

With a background in buying and leasing strip malls in northwest Ohio, Woodland Mall owner Ramy Eidi, 35, and his two business partners had never ventured into this kind of real estate. And though the Sylvania resident admits he’d never been to the mall before he heard it was for sale, Eidi said he was confident that his group could bring the mall — which was at about 85 percent capacity — up to full strength and draw in more traffic. His only regret is that they couldn’t fill it up faster, he said.

“Knowing what we knew in our [strip] malls, we preplanned our leasing strategy and I knew coming here we would fill it,” Eidi said. “Prior to coming here I knew we would fill it.”

And now for the first time in years, the mall’s General Manager Beth Genson said the facility is nearing 100 percent capacity with only one retail space to fill and three interested tenants — one of which is a national junior’s clothing store.

It’s a sight Genson, who’s been general manager at the mall since 1988 — a year after it opened — hasn’t seen too often. Over the years, the mall’s capacity has fluctuated, falling to a low of about 65 percent in 2001.

“Now we’re at the great position, the wonderful position, of being able to pick and choose who we want to bring in,” she said.

And it’s that pickiness which provided the push for the mall’s expansion, Eidi said. Pet and beauty supply stores, as well as a dollar store, are all on the list of possible businesses to fill the new freestanding spaces in front of the mall. The businesses chosen to fill the new spaces won’t be competitors of other stores in the mall, Eidi said.

“The biggest challenge, I believe, is making sure we are placing the right tenant in the right location,” he said. “Being able to say ‘no’ to a tenant that wants to be in the mall but may not be the perfect fit, that was one of the challenges for us.”

But it’s a good problem to have, Eidi said, and is something that previous owners could have faced too if they had pushed harder to fill the space, he said. Eidi is the second local owner in the mall’s 17-year history, which is now on its fifth owner.

“They obviously didn’t work the potential tenant lists,” Eidi said. “They weren’t as aggressive in trying to pursue new tenants.”

Originally developed for $16 million, Woodland Mall opened in May of 1987 under the ownership of The Mall Company out of Birmingham, Ala. A $10 million expansion was added in 1988 to accommodate the anchor department store Hills, which later went bankrupt and left the mall in 1993. The mall changed hands twice before seeing local ownership for the first time in 2001 when Bowling Green developers Allen Green, of Al Green Builders, and Scott Prephan bought the property for just under $2 million.

The switch to local ownership was a noticeable one, Genson said.

Green and Prephan sank about $750,000 worth of improvements into the property which included adding heat, plumbing and electricity into some spaces that had never been finished, Green said in an interview earlier this week. Now, Eidi is taking steps, like filling the mall and expanding, to finish what they started.

“The most exciting thing is to have local ownership that really cares about the mall,” Genson said. “When people are out-of-state, it’s kind of out of sight, out of mind. They don’t have a feel for the community, and there was only so much I could do to try to convey the needs and what would work … “

Craig Haley, owner of Mattresses Etc. in the mall, says he’s also noticed a “dramatic change” in the way the mall is run since they’ve had local ownership, most recently with Eidi arriving on the scene. Haley initially came to the mall in 1996 and then left for a strip center near Kroger’s after four years, only to return to the mall three years later, where he says his business grows every year.

“I don’t know that [the out of state owners] put a lot of effort into getting tenants into malls. They wanted what I thought was too much money,” he said. “It’s phenomenal the changes that Ramy [Eidi] has made. Just the fact that we’re at full capacity is great. It’s amazing what somebody can do when you put your mind to it and put money behind it.”

And there’s something else previous owners may have missed that Eidi said he’s tapping into — marketing. But instead of just getting the mall’s name out there, he said he’d rather focus on advertising for particular stores with Woodland Mall hidden in the background. Eidi has already tripled the amount of what the mall spends on marketing compared to the previous owner, he said.

“It’s not outlandish, but we’ve got to spend money,” Eidi said. “That extra money makes a huge difference to our tenants. Our success as landlords is contingent upon our tenants’ success.”

Eidi’s aggressive approach to marketing and his foresight in his current addition under construction fits current trends in the industry, according to local retail experts.

Evolving in the late 1960s, the traditional mall relies on department stores as anchors, counting on shoppers to walk around when they come to these destination stores. But commercial retail today favors open-air facilities with quick in-and-out possibilities, said Tom Taylor, a real estate broker and senior vice president with CB Richard Ellis Reichle Klein in Maumee. Taylor specializes in retail sales and leasing with the company.

“I think it has to do with the fact that in our day and age, life is so fast-paced,” he said. “It’s the idea that I want to pull up to the front door, make a decision in 15 minutes and get out. Enclosed malls are, for the most part, across the country, becoming a dying breed.”

With plans to make the entrances to the new additions face the mall, the unorthodox expansion will have to be matched with the right retailers to be a success, said Earl Boatwright, an instructor in the marketing department at the University who specializes in retail management.

“The mixture is a little different here,” he said. “I think what you’ve got is the old type trying as hard as they can to move to the new type. You’re not going to be able to replicate [an open-air mall] by trying to add stores in the front. Is it going to hurt them? No, not if they get the right kind of retailers in there.”

Though Taylor said the local retail market is “not trending downward,” how the additions will do when they open next year remains up in the air.

“My crystal ball would read the jury’s still out on that,” Taylor said. “In general, the retail segment of our commercial real estate business has been slow, has been soft the last couple of months. But I think if they get the ball rolling, like Eidi seems to be doing, and they keep it rolling, who knows?”

Regardless of marketing and current trends, retail — especially in northwest Ohio — has its risks. But Eidi is trying to redefine the identity of the Woodland Mall in the local market and it’s a risk he’s willing to take.

And for tenants who’ve been around long enough to see the mall at its lowest, that’s good news.

“Woodland Mall has got a bad rap,” Haley said. “It’s not a Franklin Park mall and it never will be in my lifetime, but it’s a small town, family-friendly atmosphere. I just wish more people from Bowling Green would try to take the opportunity to shop here locally. They just hop in their cars and drive up the interstate when they could buy the same things here locally and maybe even cheaper.”

But Eidi’s vision extends beyond current construction at the mall. The possibility of another exit off of Interstate 75 in the next five years has the new mall owner thinking big.

According to John Fawcett, municipal administrator with the city of Bowling Green, talks between the city and the University still center around adding the new interchange off of Newton Road, which would put the exit seconds away from the mall.

“Not only will we have the business of Bowling Green and the surrounding community, but the amount of traffic that will be running north and south is going to make people want to get off here,” Eidi said.

And showing people what the mall has to offer is what it’s all about, Eidi said.

“The energy is strong, and what I like to boast about most with the mall is not the job that’s being done, but what our tenants have to offer,” he said.

“We have some of the best kept secrets around.”