Signature Associates

Upscale Grand Rapids shopping center acquired by private, East Coast development firm

Posted By: mlive on June 23, 2025.  For more information, please click here to read the source article.

Scott Wierda and Brian DeVries are bidding farewell to Breton Village.

The Grand Rapids-area real estate developers, who purchased Breton Village in 2002 and transformed it from an enclosed mall to an open-air shopping center with a mix of high-end local and national retailers, have sold the property to Massachusetts-based WS Development.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The timing of the deal was driven in part by Wierda’s and DeVries’ age, Wierda said, and where they’re at in the arc of their careers.

For DeVries, who is in his 70s, the sale made sense from an estate planning perspective, Wierda said. Wierda, meanwhile, recently launched a business with his son Spencer, 28, that’s working on multi-family housing developments and a large-scale housing and retail project in Gaslight Village.

“Brian and I have been at this a long time,” said Wierda, 60. “We achieved our goals. It was the right time, the right group, the right offer for use to turn it over.”

The shopping center opened in 1958 with a Kroger grocery store near the corner of Breton Road and Burton Street on the Southeast Side of Grand Rapids. Development of the attached shopping plaza, later converted to an enclosed mall, began in 1961.

Today, it’s anchored by longtime tenant D&W Fresh Market, as well as a host of restaurants, and local and national specialty retailers.

The list includes eateries such as Café de Miro, Core Life Eatery and Morning Belle, as well as Leigh’s, Fitzgerald’s Men’s Store, Boyne Country Sports, Lululemon, Orvis and West Elm. The shopping center is 93% leased, Wierda said, with vacancies including the former Bobcat Bonnie’s restaurant that closed in December 2024.

Jeremy Sclar, chairman and CEO of WS Development, called Breton Village an “established property with incredible potential for growth.”

“With its strong tenant mix and deep community ties, it’s an honor for WS to join the Grand Rapids community and we look forward to enhancing the beloved community destination for many generations to come,” said Sclar, whose company is based outside of Boston in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.

WS Development describes itself as “one of the largest private development firms in the country.” It owns more than 100 properties in 13 states, including two shopping centers in Illinois and one in Wisconsin.

Wierda said WS Development was the right buyer for Breton Village, not only because they have retail expertise but also because they “care about the community they invest in.”

“It wasn’t just about a sale,” he said. “It was a combination of something that worked for us financially but also selling it to somebody who cares about the community they invest in, and that they continue to invest in the asset, and continue to invest in re-tenanting when there is vacancies.”

Wierda noted that Breton Village wasn’t listed for sale, and that WS Development has been seeking to buy the shopping center for roughly a decade.

‘De-Malling’ Breton Village

The sale comes with a bit of “nostalgia” for Wierda.

Today, the shopping center has few vacancies and draws a steady stream of shoppers. Getting to this point hasn’t been easy.

In 2002, when Wierda and DeVries purchased Breton Village, retail development was booming along undeveloped suburban corridors. Destinations such as RiverTown Crossings, a two-story- mall in Grandville, had been built just a few years earlier.

Meanwhile, vacancies at Breton Village were “starting to escalate,” Wierda said.

Despite that, the two business partners saw potential at the shopping center, noting its densely populated neighborhood and proximity to affluent shoppers from East Grand Rapids. But making that “potential” a reality required “significant change.”

That change took the form of transforming Breton Village from a 200,000-square-foot-enclosed mall to an open-air shopping center.

Wierda, who has worked in real estate investment for four decades, calls it “the most challenging thing I’ve done in the development business.”

“We had tenants with leases that controlled door closures and all sorts of things that made it challenging to do,” he said. “So Brian and I had to make the tough decision of knowing what we wanted to do but knowing that we had to spend the time and the effort to slowly get control of all the spaces where we could do what we envisioned, and that took years.”

Fifteen years to be exact.

But between 2017 and 2019, with the help of investors Dan DeVos and Dan Bowen, the dream became a reality.

The mall’s roof was peeled away. Storefronts were added for all tenants. Outdoor green spaces, seating areas and sidewalk snowmelt systems were added. And a new building was constructed on the shopping center’s west end for women’s clothing retailer Talbots and other tenants.

“It’s been an incredible 23-year journey,” Wierda said.

Attracting national retailers

There were other bumps along the road — even before the longtime push to “de-mall” Breton Village was completed.

The Great Recession pummeled Michigan several years after Wierda and DeVries purchased Breton Village from the Visser family in 2002. After sinking millions into renovations in 2005 and 2006, new tenant activity came to a virtual standstill.

But by 2011, activity had picked up.

The first big moment came in November of that year, when women’s clothing retailer Anthropologie opened at Breton Village. It was the first Anthropologie store to open in Grand Rapids, and part of Wierda’s push to make Breton Village stand out by attracting specialty, national retailers.

At the time, he said the store’s arrival “has forever changed Breton Village.”

“In the retail world, shopping centers tend to get very homogenized,” said Wierda, a former managing partner at CWD Real Estate Investment, one of the largest property owners in downtown Grand Rapids. “In ‘anywhere USA’ you find the same tenants, they look the same, all those kinds of things.”

Landing Anthropology paved the way for other successes, such as the opening of Lululemon in 2014, West Elm in 2015 and Free People in 2016.

Local retailers

While specialty, national retailers were sought, attention was also paid to maintaining local retailers that were the foundation of Breton Village for years.

One of the first instances was Leigh’s, a luxury women’s clothing retailer that Wierda considers one of the best boutiques in the state.

Shortly after Wierda and DeVries bought Breton Village in 2002, Leigh’s longtime owner, Larry Leigh, announced he was retiring. Wierda said he considered the retailer a “material part of our vision” to take local, specialized stores and feature them.

So he and DeVries, along with Wierda’s wife, Rebecca, decided to purchase and renovate Leigh’s, making it Breton Village’s first outdoor tenant.

“Leigh’s is one of the best and always was,” said Wierda, who noted the presence of other local, established retailers at Breton Village such as Fitzgerald’s Men’s Store and Mason Jones.

As his time overseeing Breton Village closes out, Wierda said he’s confident the shopping center is well positioned for continued success.

Many retailers at Breton Village don’t publicly report their sales, but he said he’d be “surprised if we’re not the highest in the community.”

“We’re proud of the transformation we’ve led,” Wierda said, “and deeply grateful to our community for embracing this place and making it part of their lives.”