One way that Sears Holdings has been raising cash recently has been to take advantage of its vast portfolio of retail real estate, selling store buildings to an affiliated real estate investment trust and using the proceeds to keep the rest of the company going. That’s how the chain even posted a profit last year for the first time since 2012. Now its new landlord, the trust, is asking Sears to shrink down its living space and take on some roommates.

Before and after sales to the trust, which is a joint venture with commercial real estate company General Growth Properties, Sears Holdings has been seeking tenants for parts of Sears and Kmart stores. Even if you don’t take the company’s financial troubles into account, changes in the retail business mean that the company doesn’t need all of that space, and it’s put to better use rented out to Primark or Whole Foods.

The trust has been moving that process along, and now Sears has announced that it will be shrinking down a dozen stores across the country by 2018, including one in the Chicago suburbs near-ish its headquarters.

You’re here to find out whether your local store is on the list of stores scheduled to shrink, though: here that is. Sears Holdings hasn’t said what the exact assortment of products will be in the shrunken stores, but some of them will be shrunk all the way down to becoming appliance-only stores.

Bakersfield, CA
Pembroke Pines, FL
Oak Brook, IL
Natick, MA
Columbia, MD
Minnetonka, MN
Albuquerque, NM
Staten Island, NY
Norman, OK
Frisco, TX

Sears in Oak Brook, elsewhere to be downsized [Daily Herald]

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