WESTCHESTER, IL-Locally-based Tri-Land Properties Inc. is keeping busy during this downturn, having invested before the fall in about a dozen retail redevelopment properties that have turnaround potential. These infill sites, the company says, are in demographic areas where residential has kept up, such as the firm’s recent start on redoing the 183,000-square-foot Brywood Centre in Kansas City, MO.

Richard Dube, president and owner of the company, tells GlobeSt.com that his firm didn’t chase new growth areas in the early part of the decade. This strategy paid off, he says. “We don’t need new rooftops to make our centers effective,” Dube says. “Those people who own land in the Kansas City area that is south of the beltways of interstates 35 and 435, where all the heavy growth was occurring, they don’t have enough houses now that could generate sales. And there certainly won’t be any new residential development anytime soon.”

His company is working on various phases of half a dozen projects, including Brywood and Cherokee Hills Shopping Center in Overland Park, KS, at 95th Street and Antioch Road. Dube says his firm will finish next month with a $23 million redevelopment on the 133,000-square-foot power center.

The center now has updated tenants, which include Walgreens, a Paul Mitchell School, Hallmark and H&R Block. “Before we started, we had tenants that were a throw-back from 25 years ago, such as a vacuum repair store. They were hanging on, as long as they paid very little rent, they were happy to stay there,” Dube says. “We were able to attract restaurants and service retail with the repositioning.”

Brywood will include a recently renovated Price Chopper supermarket and a 12,000-square-foot Dollar Tree. The city helped out with a $10 million TIF and Community Investment District designation.

Other projects include the redevelopment of a former Kmart location into an 85,000-square-foot Hy-Vee supermarket in Blue Springs, MO, a center in Smyrna, GA that will include a 90,000-square-foot Kroger market and another 60,000 square feet of stores, an two separate sites near Minneapolis where the Tri-Land will downsize Cub supermarkets to 60,000 square feet. “We stopped buying sites after 2006, but we may start looking to buy again in June 2011.”

Tri-Land Properties owns or manages roughly 2.8 million square feet of retail space throughout the country. The company focuses on the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and Southeast; and owns properties that range from 100,000 square feet to 750,000 square feet.