Ten former Masters stores across the country will reopen as shopping malls in time for Christmas, with another 30 to follow in 2018, setting off one of the biggest shake-ups in big box retailing in years.
Home Consortium, the group that outfoxed other major property players last year to put its foot on the extensive Masters property portfolio, is set to open 10 centres in NSW, Victoria and Queensland, primarily targeting lifestyle and leisure retailers.
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Six reasons for Masters' $3 billion fail
How could the masters of Masters, Woolworths and US partner Lowe's, go so spectacularly wrong?
Toys'R'us, Anaconda, Nick Scali and Amart Furniture will be among anchor tenants in converted Masters stores slated to open between October and December in Rutherford and Penrith in NSW, South Morang in Victoria, and Tingalpa and North Lakes in Queensland.
Home Consortium has outlined plans to target each of its former Masters buildings at one of three retailing categories - supermarket and liquor-related "daily needs", leisure and lifestyle, and homewares and electrical.
Consortium chairman David Di Pilla said the first five stores were focused on the leisure and lifestyle category, with some homeware and electrical offerings included.
"Those centres that we are going ahead with before Christmas are largely tenanted up. Some are full, some have maybe got one spot left," Mr Di Pilla said.
In the retailing mix at each new centre will be service-oriented tenants including childcare centres, gyms, cafes and medical centres or other clinics.
"To give them a closer connection to their community ... depending on the centre and the mix, you'll get an element of those services going into each site," he said.
Home Consortium appointed estate agents Colliers International as its national leasing agent and took on Cushman & Wakefield as its retail centre manager.
The group said it was working with four different construction firms to repurpose the first 10 centres in a process that would take up to 12 weeks for each.
Tenants will have a four-week window in September and November to fit out stores.
Up to 80 per cent of the 500,000 square metres of retail space across the 40 former Masters stores was leased or under offer to national retailers, the group said.
"Retailers have been able to come to us and underpin their medium-term growth plans and, in one negotiation, lock up multiple sites," Mr Di Pilla said.
"Some of our retailers are very keen to be up and running and opening prior to Christmas. We've delivered very competitive rents. That will put our retailers on a very strong footing."
The bulk of "daily needs" centres focused on retailers such as Woolworths, Coles, Liquorland, Dan Murphy's or IGA will open next year.
"They will have much more foot traffic to them so the way you manage, operate and run them will be very different to one that's more of a homewares or electrical centre," he said.
Home Consortium expects 30,000 visits a week in supermarket-focused centres, about half that in lifestyle-oriented locations and up to 10,000 visits a week in homeware centres.
Woolworths offloaded 40 Masters freehold and 21 leasehold sites to Home Consortium as part of an $830 million deal last year that included the Spotlight group picking up 21 Masters development sites.
Home Consortium recently moved to offload eight of the former Masters sites worth more than $100 million, electing to put them on the market for sale or lease because they were surplus to its strategy to repurpose outlets as multi-tenant retail spaces.
Woolworths is also currently looking for tenants to fill four former Master stores in Victoria and Queensland where it was unable to break its lease guarantees.