When a Vacancy Becomes an Opportunity: Five Below Joins Eastvale Gateway A vacancy in a shopping center isn’t automatically bad news. Sometimes it’s the opening a leasing team has been waiting for, the chance to bring in something that fits where the center is actually headed instead of just patching the hole. That’s basically what happened at Eastvale Gateway when Party City moved out. Lewis Retail Centers’ leasing team started working the space almost right away, and what they landed on was Five Below. It joins a lineup that already includes Target, Home Depot and Kohl’s as anchors, plus Best Buy, T.J. Maxx, HomeGoods, Ulta, PetSmart, and a solid run of restaurants and everyday services. Not a bad neighborhood to move into. The Right Retailer for the Right Center Filling a vacant space is easy in theory. Anyone who’ll sign a lease can technically fill it. The harder, more interesting work is figuring out who actually belongs there, based on the center itself, the customers who already shop it, and what a new tenant adds that isn’t already covered. Eastvale Gateway makes that job a little easier because the fundamentals are strong to begin with. Sitting at Limonite and Hamner avenues, it pulls from Eastvale and the surrounding communities, Mira Loma, Ontario, Corona, Norco and Chino among them. Current leasing materials put annual visits north of 10 million, which is roughly 30,000 people coming through the center on a typical day. That’s the kind of number that makes a space worth fighting over rather than just filling. Leasing Is About the Mix, Not the Vacancy Here’s the thing about tenant mix: it’s never really done. Every time a retailer leaves, there’s a version of the leasing conversation that’s just about plugging the hole, and a better version that asks who actually belongs there next. Those aren’t the same question, and the second one takes longer to answer. It means looking at the trade area, what’s already leased, how people move through the center, what’s missing, and where the property is trying to go over the next few years. At Eastvale Gateway, that process is what led to Five Below rather than whoever happened to be looking for space at the time. Keeping Eastvale Gateway Moving Forward Centers that stay relevant tend to have one thing in common: they keep adjusting instead of standing still. Eastvale Gateway has grown into one of the stronger retail destinations in the area precisely because it hasn’t stopped evolving alongside the community around it. Five Below moving into the old Party City space fits that pattern. A vacancy became a chance to add something new, keep the center’s momentum going, and reinforce a mix that’s built to hold up over time, not just fill a quarter’s leasing report. None of that happens on its own. It happens because there’s a team that keeps asking what’s next, long before a space actually goes empty.
