Thoughts on buying near a walmart?

Question

There is a new walmart near a property I am looking at. Does anyone have experience with properties near walmarts and how a superstore might affect them?

Matt R. · Answer

As I said in my post, it was based on experiences living in Oklahoma and Missouri.  For quite a while, I used to shop at Walmart store number 12... before that I shopped at store number 101.  I think maybe I'm used to seeing Walmarts.

Joel Owens · Answer

Check where the property is located and overlay that on top of the current land use map for the county or city depending on where the property resides.

Then do the same thing for the future land use map.

The dirt can be more valuable than the house depending on where the land is.

Shane H. · Answer

@Matt R.

I'm guessing this property must be located on the coast or you aren't used to seeing Wal-Marts?

As much as I dont like what the company has become, they typically will be a positive for the immediate area.  In the midwest/great plains at least, any place a wal mart (be it a neighborhood market, supercenter etc) has located, the immediate property nearby shoots up in value and plenty of development always follows on the outparcels and surrounding property.

Having a home located near a wal-mart should not be a negative thing, unless the home is located on the main thoroughfare granting egress/ingress to the store parking lot, then possibly the increased traffic may negatively affect the value or rental desirability.

Matt R. · Answer

Disclaimer: This is based on experience living in Oklahoma and Missouri.  I don't own any properties that are next to or close to a Walmart.  I don't work for Walmart or any of their competitors.

The Walmarts I've shopped at tend to have multi-family properties (duplexes, apartments with maybe 6 to 8 units each) fairly close by, and then single-family homes further away.

The one where I shop now has an apartment complex right next door, and I've seen people carrying bags out of the store and heading for the apartments.  When it was first built, there was a fence down the property line between the complex and Wal-Mart; the apartment residents made a hole in the fence so they could cut their walking distance to the store, so the complex eventually put a gate in instead.

There is a Walmart on the far east side of Kansas City, MO that has a bus stop in the parking lot.  Lots of people will ride the bus to that Walmart to go shopping; there aren't very many good alternatives for groceries on the east side of town.

If your potential owner or tenant might not have a car, or maybe they want to not use a car so much, then "walk to Walmart" is a good selling point, I think.

Walmart also has a couple of different store formats.  The Supercenter is the big one - with a grocery store on one side, clothes in the middle, and dry goods on the other side.  The Neighborhood Market is a lot smaller and almost all groceries.

For a Supercenter, there will be lots of car traffic, and lots of semi-truck traffic for deliveries.  A Neighborhood Market will have less traffic than a Supercenter, but still a good amount.  A Supercenter is probably a better "draw" than a Neighborhood Market, but a Neighborhood Market can be a good draw if there aren't any other inexpensive grocery stores nearby.

This is becoming slightly less common over time, but sometimes Walmart will up and move their store, which usually results in a giant empty box at the existing location.  If there was an associated strip mall with the existing location, often those small stores will empty out too.  I think this happened more in the 1990s and 2000s, as they built Supercenters to replace existing smaller stores.  Now, they almost always start a new store as a Supercenter, in a location where they'll have plenty of business for it.  My unofficial estimate is that if you have a brand-new Supercenter, it'll probably be there for 15 to 20 years at least.

Colin Thomas · Answer

Walmart in an Urban location, just to be a little bit more specific...