An Ohio-based real estate investment company is planning on pumping several million dollars into redeveloping the vacant Mall at Westlake in Bessemer into a light industrial park.

Range Light Investment Partners acquired the property for $3 million with plans to transform it into the Marvel City Business Park.

The former mall interior will be gutted, leaving the slab and steel structure. Workers will install new roofing, upgraded lighting and electrical systems and façade enhancements.

Docks and drive-in doors will also be added, based on tenant specifications.

Space for the park’s first tenants could be ready by the fourth quarter of this year.

The 40-acre, 323,000-square-foot former mall, named after the lake drained to make way for its development, was built in 1969. It has been closed since 2009.

It was once home to Sears, Pizitz, Loveman’s, Goody’s, Radio Shack, Lorch’s and Handy TV and Appliance. In earlier days, it had tenants such as New Ideal, Aland’s and Sokol’s.

Its Sears store was replaced with a Bruno’s location and later a Food World.

Through the 1970s, it was a bustling shopping center and starting in the 1980s underwent various redevelopment attempts.

Range Light’s principal said he particularly likes Bessemer for its “capable workforce and a business-friendly tax environment,” and has enjoyed doing business in the Birmingham metro area.

“We love Birmingham, we love it industrially, we love that whole region,” said Pat Foran, the principal of Range Light Investment Partners. “Really the whole state. You guys make stuff there, and that’s the business we’re in.”

Foran said the company plans to spend “five or six times” the purchase price of the property in revamping it. He said the company has had experience and success in redeveloping former shopping centers.

And malls are good places for redevelopment, he said, given their parking, excess land and location near highway interchanges.

“Malls are easier conversions than if you’re buying second, third, fourth generation industrial properties,” he said. “Those buildings usually have a lot of wear and tear.”

Foran said the company has been working on the project since March of 2024, when the company put the property under contract.

It is zoned for light industrial uses.

“The type of product we put in there is not a foundry, or a paper mill, or something with smokestacks,” he said. “That’s not this. This is tech, R&D, light assembly, warehousing, last-mile type places.”

The park will be in close proximity with the intersection of Interstates 20 and 459, and designed to meet the demand for 30,000 to 50,000-square-foot light industrial and manufacturing space.

“Marvel City Business Park will cater to those smaller bay-sized tenants who don’t need 36-foot-high ceilings and want more affordable rent than what the newer big-box developments demand,” Foran said.

The property will be co-leased by Brad Moffatt, SIOR and Wirth Doss of Cushman & Wakefield / EGS Commercial Real Estate and Jenna Gauntner of CBRE.

Gauntner and Philip Yost of CBRE Birmingham represented Range Light Investment Partners in the acquisition.