June 30, 2026
Date: June 30, 2026
The Shops at Palm Desert — the 72-acre, nearly 1-million-square-foot enclosed mall at 72880 Highway 111, owned by Pacific Retail Capital Partners — remains in an early, active redevelopment process as of mid-2026. Pacific Retail is preparing a site plan for city review. Separately, the City of Palm Desert issued a Surplus Land Act Notice of Availability to sell the adjacent, city-owned 7.46-acre former Sears parcel (APN 640-140-020); the solicitation set a submission deadline of May 7, 2026. The outcome of that solicitation is not yet part of the public record.
Two distinct tracks are running on the same site and are easy to conflate. The larger mall parcel is privately owned by Pacific Retail, which acquired it in 2023 and is advancing a master-plan vision for a mixed-use destination combining retail, hospitality, office, recreation, and housing. The smaller former Sears parcel is city-owned and being sold through California’s Surplus Land Act process, a statutory mechanism with its own noticing and negotiation timeline separate from the mall’s private redevelopment. The city’s redevelopment vision rests on market studies prepared by Streetsense in 2022–2023; an October 2025 city update confirmed Pacific Retail’s active engagement and rising mall occupancy, and the city reaffirmed the project as a priority in early 2026.
According to AICV, the Shops at Palm Desert is best understood as two parallel processes rather than one: a privately held mall advancing toward a city-reviewed site plan, and a city-held adjacent parcel moving through a statutory surplus-land sale that closed to submissions on May 7, 2026 with no published outcome as of this date. Agents evaluating this site should not infer a stalled or inactive project from the absence of recent master-plan announcements; the public record shows concurrent activity on both tracks, with the governing market studies dating to 2022–2023 and therefore due for refresh before any conclusion about current demand. The most material unresolved fact is the disposition of the Sears-parcel solicitation, which is not yet public.