Hotel-Retail Plan Wins Approval

Marketplace Properties' 98,000-sf project will be called Town Place Square and will be anchored by a four-story, 112-room Marriott TownePlace Suites Hotel, an 8,400-sf retail shop building plus three additional pads designated for retail and sit-down restaurants. The hotel component will be developed by Campbell Motel Properties Inc. of Brea, which is acquiring two of the seven acres and will own and operate the hotel under a franchise agreement with Marriott. Construction of the hotel and retail shop building is scheduled to commence this summer, with the opening slated for spring 2005.

Michael Rue, president of Marketplace Properties, calls the project site a key intersection for development in view of the existing retail there. Surrounding the 2.1-million-sf, Ontario Mills, which draws 22 million visitors a year, are a number of shopping centers with anchors such as Kohl's, Costco, Sam's Club and Staples, plus nearly a dozen sit-down restaurants. In addition, the City of Ontario is developing a 150-acre project next to Ontario Mills that is due to include a sports and entertainment arena, restaurants, specialty shops, offices, hotels and multifamily neighborhoods when it is fully developed. Additionally, more than 500 new hotel rooms are planned within a short walking distance of Town Place Square, along with numerous new residential projects planned within a one-mile radius.

Marketplace Properties is a shopping center development company that was founded in 1985. It has completed 15 projects totaling approximately one million sf of leasable building area, at a cumulative cost of about $114 million, most of them in the eight-county Southern California regions.