Spotmojo’s in Newark (CA)

Posted on May 15, 2013 by michael

Last week at the Oakland Koreatown Northgate Broker Open House we met Aziz Khatri of KW Commercial. He’s the listing agent for Balentine Plaza in Newark, CA which has several vacancies that he’s trying to fill.

Aziz actually learned about Spotmojo by running into one of our posters in Alameda and when he ran into me at the open house he thought it was a great idea to involve the community to help fill some of the retail vacancies. So today, we installed several posters in Balentine Plaza.

Balentine Plaza is an older shopping center with several businesses that cater towards Indians but also has stuff for everyone The two main traffic generators is a big Indian restaurant, Chandni, and Food Maxx. The shopping center also has businesses like TOGO’s, UPS, nail salons, dentists, sushi, etc…

There are five vacancies where four are setup for general retail and one was a previous dentist office.

To suggest something for Balentine Plaza use this link: http://www.spotmojo.com/openspot/balentine/

Spotmojo in Oakland’s Temescal

Posted on May 10, 2013 by michael

At the KONO broker open house we met Ben Weinstein of Citrine Advisors. They’re a boutique commercial real estate consulting firm that owns and manages property in Oakland and other parts of the East Bay.

I heard Richard Weinstein, also from Citrine Advisors, talk at a breakfast forum earlier in the week and I really liked how their focus is less on attracting national chains, but to embrace the uniqueness of each city by seeking smaller businesses: independently owned businesses or smaller, regional chains.

Today we put some Spotmojo posters in their vacancies at two of their vacancies. One is at 4001 Broadway and the other is just a block up at 4101 Broadway. These are in the Temescal neighborhood of Oakland.

At the 4101 Broadway space, True Burger has signed a lease and is building out that space. There’s a small space left on the 41st Street side. The 4001 Broadway space is a nice corner location that was once Temescal Produce Market.

To make a suggestion for Temescal use this link: http://www.spotmojo.com/openspot/temescal/

You can also text in your suggestion with: (510) 379-7100

Mountain View & Campbell are getting their Spotmojo on

Posted on April 17, 2013 by michael

We’re continuing our reach in Silicon Valley and this week we started working in Mountain View and Campbell through the Patch. They’ll be joining Cupertino and Los Altos where we’ve been already working.

We’ll definitely be continuing to spread our coverage in Silicon Valley which we believe will help small businesses that are considering the area to pinpoint the perfect location.

Mountain View: I’ve lived and worked in Mountain View so I’m pretty familiar with it. Most of you know it’s the home, or vacation home, to big tech names like Google, Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Campus, LinkedIn, and many others.

On the retail side, Mountain View has a really nice downtown on Castro Street that’s very walkable (once you drive there) and has a lot of options to eat, drink and spend money. I used to spend a whole day with my daughter here on weekends. We’d get a gyros and some hummus at the Gyros House, go to Books Inc and read some children’s books, then we’d go to Yoogl for some frozen yogurt. Good times…

In addition, Mountain View has a bunch of neighborhood shopping centers. The old Sears was demolished a couple years ago and they’re almost done with The Village at San Antonio Center. This is a large mixed-use development anchored by a lifestyle Safeway store. It’s pretty ambitious but I think they will have little problems renting out the apartments and retail space. Now, renting it out is one thing, but getting businesses in there that people actually want may be another story. There still are some vacant spaces and we hope to be able to give the new residents a voice in what moves in there.

Campbell: I haven’t lived or worked in Campbell and am really not that familiar with it. It borders Cupertino to the north where we have been doing a lot of work so I think this continuation will help businesses find demand that are considering these two cities.

Campbell also has a really nice historic downtown district. I was actually surprised how nice it was when I visited a couple of weeks ago. I took pictures of every single shop and plan on using them in this “Downtown Gallery” project that I’ve been thinking about. There are only a couple of vacancies in downtown, but there are some.

Campbell also has many neighborhood shopping centers and a larger shopping center called Pruneyard. Pruneyard had a large vacancy left by Barnes & Noble, but recently Sports Basement moved in and brought mojo back into that spot. Most of the shopping centers do have at least one vacancy, including Pruneyard, so we hope to give the community a voice in what opens in them.

You can follow our articles on Mountain View Patch here and Campbell Patch here.

We’re working on some other communities in Silicon Valley so stay tuned…

Spotmojo’s in Oakland’s Koreatown Northgate District

Posted on April 17, 2013 by michael

A couple of weeks ago we started talking to Oakland’s Koreatown Northgate (KONO) district through their business improvement district. And today we started to put up some posters there. We’ll be talking to all the property owners in the district and trying to get our posters in more of them.

We have some good momentum in a lot of the East Bay cities through our relationship with Patch, but Patch only covers a small part of Oakland (Piedmont and Rockridge).

Oakland has always been on my mind since that’s actually where I was living when I first started thinking about Spotmojo. Oakland’s an interesting city that definitely has some challenges. I think it’ll take creative ideas like Spotmojo to help it get where everyone wants it to go. And in the past few years parts of Oakland have been making significant progress.

The Koreatown Northgate district is situated in-between Oakland’s growing Uptown Arts and Entertainment District and the thriving Temescal-Telegraph business district.

As the name implies, there are many Korean owned businesses in the area from Korean BBQ restaurants, Korean supermarkets, beauty supply stores, etc.

It’s also well known as the district where the First Friday Art Murmur event happens. They don’t actually officially host it, but it happens here.

So in the coming weeks we’ll be working to get more posters in the vacant spots and we have some other ideas to help get the word out in KONO.

To suggest something for KONO, type in KONO in Spotmojo’s search box or just use this link: http://www.spotmojo.com/openspot/kono/

Spotmojo’s in Los Altos!

Posted on April 5, 2013 by michael

Quickly following Walnut Creek, we’re also spinning up in the Los Altos Patch!

Los Altos is an affluent bedroom community that borders Palo Alto to the north and Mountain View to the south. Although there are only 30,000 residents there are seven shopping districts. Downtown Los Altos is a really nice, walkable downtown with unique shops, many of them independently owned, but you’ll also find a few chains as well.

There usually aren’t many vacancies here, but there are some and surprisingly there are some that have stayed vacant for quite some time. In Los Altos and the surrounding cities, there is a lot of competition for your shopping, dining, and yoga dollars so there’s bound to be some rotation.

Here’s our first post, well more of a intro to Spotmojo article.

Spotmojo’s in Walnut Creek!

Posted on April 4, 2013 by michael

This week we’ll be starting to write in the Walnut Creek Patch to ask people in Walnut Creek what they would like to see fill the vacancies.

Walnut Creek has really become a shopping destination drawing people from all over the area. It’s known for Broadway Plaza, an upscale, outdoor mall with stores like Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Tiffany’s…you get the picture. Then just on the other side of Mt. Diablo Boulevard is downtown Walnut Creek. Downtown is really nice and homey, has many independently owned businesses. There’s anything from high-end wine shops, stuff for kids like ballet classes, toy shops, to old-fashioned barber shops.

Since the recession that started around 2009, several stores in downtown closed. We’ll be featuring these vacancies and others in Walnut Creek asking the community what they would like to see there.

Park Street Plaza Posters v2.0

Posted on April 3, 2013 by michael

We actually put posters up at Park Street Plaza a little while ago, but we weren’t happy with the way it turned out so we redid it today.

Park Street Plaza is a very charming mini-mall on Alameda’s Park Street. The owner, Debbie George, has been running a mattress and furniture store in Alameda for a couple decades in this space which was formerly known as Pillow Park Plaza. But they want to retire from running the day-to-day business so they bought the building and want to rent it out.

The inside of the plaza is really nicely decorated in this sort of wine country style. The largest space is rented out to Lanvie, a women’s clothing store, which is visibile from Park Street. And inside the plaza there are five stores. Debbie and her husband will be running a cigar & wine shop. An art instruction studio and women’s consignment store are moving in soon, and then there’s still a couple spaces up for grabs.

New Landing Page!

Posted on March 31, 2013 by michael

This weekend we released a new landing page. This page will be shown to first time users.

When we built Spotmojo we focused on the application, using the map, making suggestions, voting, etc. Many of our users come to Spotmojo with a special code from our poster or a link from Patch that will bring them straight to a vacant spot where they can make a suggestion. But for users coming directly into Spotmojo.com, especially in an area where we don’t have any users, it was pretty confusing.

We’ve been thinking about this problem for a while. I had a rough idea what I wanted it to do, but Ron refined it and I think this landing page design looks awesome.

We give a short explanation of what Spotmojo is, we show some recent suggestions, we show some recent headlines, and we built a new widget for users to suggest something.

Anyhow, I hope you like it and I hope this helps new users. Check it out:

http://www.spotmojo.com/landing

Posters in Alameda’s South Shore Center

Posted on March 29, 2013 by michael

Today we installed two posters in Alameda’s South Shore Center. This is a first for a couple of things.

First, this is probably the most significant property we’ve installed our posters in, in terms of the size of the development project. It may also have the highest foot traffic or at least potential foot traffic.

Second, this is also a first in terms of the difficulty in installing the poster. Normally, I just install the posters myself with some packaging tape, but the managers of this building requested it be done in a more professional way. It took some time to research what type of supplies to buy. I had to get my partner, Ron, to come and help since he is better at these sort of things. We also had to bring a table to work on. It was quite an effort but we think it was worth it.

We featured South Shore Center in a Patch article in February. The response from Alameda Patch users was great. I think a lot of Alamedans really want to see South Shore Center get its mojo.

South Shore Center was acquired by Jamestown Properties in early 2011 for $181 million. Jamestown Properties owns several commercial properties in the US. In San Francisco they own the buildings where Macy’s, The Container Store, Old Navy and Palomar Hotel are located. In Berkeley’s Fourth Street they own the buildings where Anthropologie and Spenger’s are. These are just a few of their properties, but it illustrates the significance of their properties.

Previous to Jamestown acquiring South Shore Center, an $85 million remodeling project was completed. The shopping center is designed with large anchor stores on the exterior and smaller stores in the interior.

The exterior spaces have all been completely leased out. You’ll find Safeway, Trader Joe’s, Kohl’s, Ulta, Bed Bath and Beyond, DB Shoes, Ulta, Panera, Chipotle’s, and others.

However, the interior has a lot of vacancies. You’ll find shops like Massage Envy, Great Clips, Daiso, Modern Mouse, Jenny Craig and others.

So we put two posters in the interior. One in the center plaza, by the frog pond. This area has some nice benches where a lot of people like to sit and relax. Then we put another in another in a space across from Daiso. Daiso is a pretty popular store so we think this is a good location for our poster.

The overall goal is to broaden the reach in Alameda. Although we have good participation there, almost all the users came through Patch. I’m sure the demographics in Patch are diverse, we want to increase the diversity further. And also, we hope to increase the number of suggestions specifically for South Shore Center.

Use this link to make a suggestion for South Shore Center: http://www.spotmojo.com/openspot/southshore/

Alameda Update

Posted on March 22, 2013 by michael

Today we published a fairly detailed update on our effort in Alameda. Alameda will always be in a special place for Spotmojo. Although we worked in a few areas before, Alameda is where we really started to get some traction. Thanks to Bill Phua, the developer of 1700 Park Street, and Analisa Harangozo, editor of Alameda Patch.

We actually have a very involved user base there and have almost enough participation to consider it a valid sample. We started to reach out to some of the top suggestions there and published a fairly detailed report on our efforts there.

Here’s a link to the story on the Alameda Patch: http://alameda.patch.com/articles/update-from-spotmojo