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This place is the size of Ikea times 2 but with electronics and furniture.
THE COLONY — Nebraska Furniture Mart is about to put The Colony on the retail map.
In fact, store officials are making a bold prediction that it will be the highest-volume furniture store in the U.S. when it opens in 2015.
Construction started Tuesday on the site, which has an enviable 1.66 miles of frontage space along State Highway 121.
The store is a huge deal for residents of this northern suburb who have watched millions of square feet of retail and commercial development congregate just a couple of miles away in Frisco and Plano.
“We’re expecting to draw tourism from as far as 200 miles away and more,” The Colony’s mayor, Joe McCourry, said at a groundbreaking ceremony Tuesday.
The furniture, flooring, electronics and appliance retail company, which is owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has three other stores, in Omaha, Kansas City, Kan., and Des Moines, Iowa. It spent a couple of years figuring out where to put its first store outside the Plains states.
The Colony site and Dallas region beat other finalist sites in Texas, Tennessee and Missouri.
“For us, the decision was made by city and county officials who understood this wasn’t just about a furniture store and the location, location, location,” said Bob Batt, executive vice president of Nebraska Furniture Mart and grandson of the founder.
Some local municipalities barely gave Batt the time of day. The name doesn’t necessarily conjure up notions of big business.
The 560,000-square-foot Nebraska Furniture Mart will be more than twice as big as an Ikea, or equal to four Wal-Mart Supercenters.
“We know it’s going to be hard to stand out in Texas, but we will prove ourselves to a whole new customer base that doesn’t know us,” Batt said. Store officials say the Colony store will bring in $600 million in annual sales.
The 433-acre site in The Colony has room for dozens more stores, restaurants and entertainment spots, and Nebraska Furniture Mart will develop the whole site. The Mart, as it’s called by regulars, will anchor the $1.5 billion project.
Venture Commercial represented Nebraska Furniture Mart in the purchase of raw land from several owners.
Adding to payrolls
The Mart and its warehouse will employ more than 2,000 people when it opens. It will also hire about 4,000 workers during construction. McCourry talked about the residents the project will attract, not only to The Colony but also to Carrollton, Plano and other nearby cities.
There will be an attached warehouse with more than 1.3 million square feet of space. The store guarantees that purchases will be in your vehicle within six or seven minutes and borrows some of its delivery methods from fast-food restaurants.
When Nebraska Furniture Mart’s Kansas City store was announced in early 2001, the site was surrounded by corn fields and the NASCAR Kansas Speedway was under construction nearby.
“We opened in August 2003, and now there’s a casino, a minor league baseball stadium, a soccer stadium, Cabela’s, and 100 stores and restaurants,” Batt said.
Nebraska Furniture Mart was started in 1937 by Russian immigrant Rose Blumkin in the basement of her husband’s pawnshop in Omaha.
Berkshire Hathaway owns 80 percent of Nebraska Furniture Mart; the founding family, which still runs the company, owns 20 percent.
The Mart has an Apple store inside it and sells game consoles, computers and cellphones in addition to televisions and washing machines. Flooring, kitchen cabinets and countertops, and lighting are also big departments. The Colony store will have several working kitchens set up to host demonstrations.
In every category, the Mart carries a full gamut of prices, Batt said. Its stoves, for example, start at $200 and go up to the $18,000 Viking.
Loyal customers
Customers of the Mart are as loyal and passionate as the fans of Ikea and Trader Joe’s.
Wylie resident Kevin C. Parker and his wife, Laura, who grew up in Omaha, have been customers since they married in the mid-1980s and Parker was stationed at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha.
Most of their almost 4,000-square-foot house is furnished from the Mart, and earlier this year, they drove to the Kansas City store to buy a kitchen table and chairs.
“We made a weekend trip of it,” Parker said. “I did my homework online, and their prices and no shipping saved me $700.”
Parker says the convenience of picking up purchases at the Mart should worry other retailers. After buying a bookcase at a local store recently, he wrote the store a letter, warning them what’s coming.
“Furniture shopping here is so antiquated,” he said.
“It’s not just furniture,” Parker said. “I think Best Buy should be worried, too.”
Customers seem to come back for the Mart’s service.
“I don’t know how they do it,” Parker said. “I can still remember the names of my regular salespeople at the Mart.”
The Colony created a 40-year tax increment financing district to pay back bonds that will pay for street improvements and a parking garage on the site.
Sales tax clout
The first year it’s open, the Mart is forecast to double the sales tax collections that the city now receives, said Troy Powell, city manager for The Colony.
The sales tax-funded TIF is set up to pay initial costs and then continue to fund improvements “10 to 15 years from now as things get old and need work. We’ve seen other cities struggle with that,” Powell said.
Venture Commercial partner Larry Leon and senior vice president Jonathan Cooper started working with Batt in the fall of 2009.
“They looked throughout this region at the same time they were looking in other states,” Leon said. Dallas was considered, but no site was big enough.
The group also looked at the old Texas Stadium in Irving and other sites in Plano, Frisco, Fort Worth, Grapevine and Farmers Branch. In Plano, the land behind J.C. Penney Co.’s corporate headquarters was considered, but it was too small for the total project.
City officials said they knew their undeveloped land would attract something big someday.
In his letter to shareholders this year, Buffett made the prediction that the store in The Colony will “almost certainly” be the highest-volume home furnishing store in the U.S.
Today that title is shared by the two stores in Omaha and Kansas City, each of which had record-setting sales of more than $400 million in 2011.
In fact, store officials are making a bold prediction that it will be the highest-volume furniture store in the U.S. when it opens in 2015.
Construction started Tuesday on the site, which has an enviable 1.66 miles of frontage space along State Highway 121.
The store is a huge deal for residents of this northern suburb who have watched millions of square feet of retail and commercial development congregate just a couple of miles away in Frisco and Plano.
“We’re expecting to draw tourism from as far as 200 miles away and more,” The Colony’s mayor, Joe McCourry, said at a groundbreaking ceremony Tuesday.
The furniture, flooring, electronics and appliance retail company, which is owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has three other stores, in Omaha, Kansas City, Kan., and Des Moines, Iowa. It spent a couple of years figuring out where to put its first store outside the Plains states.
The Colony site and Dallas region beat other finalist sites in Texas, Tennessee and Missouri.
“For us, the decision was made by city and county officials who understood this wasn’t just about a furniture store and the location, location, location,” said Bob Batt, executive vice president of Nebraska Furniture Mart and grandson of the founder.
Some local municipalities barely gave Batt the time of day. The name doesn’t necessarily conjure up notions of big business.
The 560,000-square-foot Nebraska Furniture Mart will be more than twice as big as an Ikea, or equal to four Wal-Mart Supercenters.
“We know it’s going to be hard to stand out in Texas, but we will prove ourselves to a whole new customer base that doesn’t know us,” Batt said. Store officials say the Colony store will bring in $600 million in annual sales.
The 433-acre site in The Colony has room for dozens more stores, restaurants and entertainment spots, and Nebraska Furniture Mart will develop the whole site. The Mart, as it’s called by regulars, will anchor the $1.5 billion project.
Venture Commercial represented Nebraska Furniture Mart in the purchase of raw land from several owners.
Adding to payrolls
The Mart and its warehouse will employ more than 2,000 people when it opens. It will also hire about 4,000 workers during construction. McCourry talked about the residents the project will attract, not only to The Colony but also to Carrollton, Plano and other nearby cities.
There will be an attached warehouse with more than 1.3 million square feet of space. The store guarantees that purchases will be in your vehicle within six or seven minutes and borrows some of its delivery methods from fast-food restaurants.
When Nebraska Furniture Mart’s Kansas City store was announced in early 2001, the site was surrounded by corn fields and the NASCAR Kansas Speedway was under construction nearby.
“We opened in August 2003, and now there’s a casino, a minor league baseball stadium, a soccer stadium, Cabela’s, and 100 stores and restaurants,” Batt said.
Nebraska Furniture Mart was started in 1937 by Russian immigrant Rose Blumkin in the basement of her husband’s pawnshop in Omaha.
Berkshire Hathaway owns 80 percent of Nebraska Furniture Mart; the founding family, which still runs the company, owns 20 percent.
The Mart has an Apple store inside it and sells game consoles, computers and cellphones in addition to televisions and washing machines. Flooring, kitchen cabinets and countertops, and lighting are also big departments. The Colony store will have several working kitchens set up to host demonstrations.
In every category, the Mart carries a full gamut of prices, Batt said. Its stoves, for example, start at $200 and go up to the $18,000 Viking.
Loyal customers
Customers of the Mart are as loyal and passionate as the fans of Ikea and Trader Joe’s.
Wylie resident Kevin C. Parker and his wife, Laura, who grew up in Omaha, have been customers since they married in the mid-1980s and Parker was stationed at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha.
Most of their almost 4,000-square-foot house is furnished from the Mart, and earlier this year, they drove to the Kansas City store to buy a kitchen table and chairs.
“We made a weekend trip of it,” Parker said. “I did my homework online, and their prices and no shipping saved me $700.”
Parker says the convenience of picking up purchases at the Mart should worry other retailers. After buying a bookcase at a local store recently, he wrote the store a letter, warning them what’s coming.
“Furniture shopping here is so antiquated,” he said.
“It’s not just furniture,” Parker said. “I think Best Buy should be worried, too.”
Customers seem to come back for the Mart’s service.
“I don’t know how they do it,” Parker said. “I can still remember the names of my regular salespeople at the Mart.”
The Colony created a 40-year tax increment financing district to pay back bonds that will pay for street improvements and a parking garage on the site.
Sales tax clout
The first year it’s open, the Mart is forecast to double the sales tax collections that the city now receives, said Troy Powell, city manager for The Colony.
The sales tax-funded TIF is set up to pay initial costs and then continue to fund improvements “10 to 15 years from now as things get old and need work. We’ve seen other cities struggle with that,” Powell said.
Venture Commercial partner Larry Leon and senior vice president Jonathan Cooper started working with Batt in the fall of 2009.
“They looked throughout this region at the same time they were looking in other states,” Leon said. Dallas was considered, but no site was big enough.
The group also looked at the old Texas Stadium in Irving and other sites in Plano, Frisco, Fort Worth, Grapevine and Farmers Branch. In Plano, the land behind J.C. Penney Co.’s corporate headquarters was considered, but it was too small for the total project.
City officials said they knew their undeveloped land would attract something big someday.
In his letter to shareholders this year, Buffett made the prediction that the store in The Colony will “almost certainly” be the highest-volume home furnishing store in the U.S.
Today that title is shared by the two stores in Omaha and Kansas City, each of which had record-setting sales of more than $400 million in 2011.
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