It was the largest piece of commercial real estate available in the city, and the price was a bargain.

That's why Advisors Excel, a national financial and investment services firm that provides a wide range of services to individual financial professionals, said it decided to become the seemingly unlikely owner of a rundown mall spanning roughly 1 million square feet in Topeka, Kansas.

Advisors Excel plans to move its corporate headquarters to the West Ridge Mall at 1801-1831 SW Wanamaker Road and reinvigorate the ailing center — the third-largest enclosed mall in Kansas — by converting it into a mixed-use destination and moving hundreds of the firm's above-average-income employees to the complex, establishing an onsite customer base for the mall's tenants.

Advisors Excel, already based in Topeka, is in the very early planning stages for the mall makeover and is working with Dallas-based Russell Glen Co. and its founder and CEO, Terrence Maiden, to redevelop the property. Kohan Retail Investment Group sold the mall to Advisors Excel for about $10 million in September.

For years now, landlords and developers across the nation have been trying to reinvigorate malls by moving beyond a traditional lineup of retailers to add office space, apartments, personal-service providers, entertainment, healthcare centers, more dining options, hospitality and sporting activities such as pickleball to their tenant roster. The goal is to drive foot traffic and help the brick-and-mortar stores compete with online shopping offered by giant Amazon and other e-commerce providers.

However, the relocation of a headquarters and hundreds of employees to a mall, where in this case many of the escalators don't even work, as part of its retail repurposing has been rare.

A version of this did happen in Toronto earlier this year. Bank of Montreal opened a headquarters in Ontario’s largest shopping mall, Eaton Centre, redeveloping a large block of vacant space that Sears once occupied. The company's 3,000 employees occupy four floors in the mall.

Now Advisors Excel is looking to potentially occupy from 350,000 to 400,000 square feet at West Ridge Mall, and to move 600 to 1,000 employees to the property, Cody Foster, the firm's founder, told CoStar News. He said he expects the retail center will continue to have retail occupants but is also looking to add additional uses such as coworking spaces, theaters, fitness studios, spas, breweries and cafes.

Advisors Excel's plans reflect the convergence of once very siloed real estate sectors, office and retail, which have undergone a lot of change. So-called "stranded" or isolated office parks — those located away from downtown restaurants and shops — have fallen out of favor, in part because workers want more on-site or nearby amenities.

That means, in turn, malls are looking to evolve with more diverse offerings to survive. Advisors Excel's move to West Ridge Mall addresses both those issues. In addition, prices for struggling malls have plummeted, making West Ridge Mall's purchase price attractive to its new owner.

At this early stage, there is a lot of uncertainty regarding Advisors Excel's headquarters relocation. A master plan for West Ridge Mall's revamping has to be mapped out. New tenants need to be attracted. There doesn't seem to be a proven playbook for a corporate headquarters taking space at an operating mall, or how it will mesh with retail tenants. And Advisors Excel has no experience as a large mall owner or operator, but said it is seeking to retain current West Ridge Mall employees and management during the transition.

But Foster is optimistic, saying that the neglected mall will now get the attention and investment it desperately needs and at the same time, his employees will give the property a built-in customer base of hundreds of his above-average-income employees all day long.

"We feel that's a pretty attractive story to tell," he said. "We feel it's pretty attractive for restaurants. We feel it's pretty attractive for retail."

Advisors Excel is expanding and needs more office space, and has been looking in the market for about a year, according to Foster. It currently has workers in two separate locations that it owns. One at 2950 SW McClure Road and another at 4123 Gage Center Drive. The Gage Center location is a former shopping complex, which includes two office buildings, that Advisors Excel repurposed in 2019.

"We don't love having two campuses," Foster said.

While some companies have been reducing their office space in the wake of the pandemic as they adopted hybrid work schedules, Advisors Excel decided "early on that we're going to be a work-from-work company, not a remote-work company," Foster said.

A big reason for that decision was that 2 ½ years ago, one of Advisors Excel's key team members committed suicide, Foster said. An office environment creates "community and culture and keeping people plugged into other humans," all important connections for the mental health of employees, according to Foster.

Advisors Excel considered relocating to a vacant 140,000-square-foot Burlington Store at the West Ridge Mall, Foster said.

But it ultimately opted to acquire the entire retail property because it offered the largest commercial space available in Topeka during a three-year time horizon and made the most sense financially, according to Foster. Advisors Excel paid under $10 per square foot for the mall, compared to the $400 to $500 a square foot that it would have cost to build a Class A office building from scratch, Foster said.

"We're going to have to pour a lot into it, but I think we saw it as a good value as much as anything," Foster said.

At this point, Advisors Excel is considering using the Burlington space as the base for its headquarters but also expanding out into the mall to occupy some of the additional vacant store space for its offices, according to Foster.

Like other dated retail properties, West Ridge Mall, which opened in 1988, has experienced a steady decline in business and occupancy over the past decade. Anchor stores such as Macy’s and Sears closed their doors in 2012 and 2018, respectively.

The property is roughly 50% occupied now, with about 50 stores open including a Dillard's anchor, according to Foster, but needs a lot of work in terms of day-to-day maintenance alone. For example, take the escalators, which Advisors Excel is fixing.

"I think there's eight escalators," Foster said. "Four that go up and down. So eight total, I think. Three of the eight currently work. And it's kind of been that way for years."

The property didn't look like it had been landscaped for some time, and Advisors Excel immediately tended to that following the acquisition, "which alone made [the mall] look better," Foster said.

The mall also includes an operating JCPenney, which is owned by its parent company, Foster said. Transformco still owns the shuttered Sears site.

The development firm that Advisors Excel is working with, Russell Glen, had success revamping and repositioning southern Dallas' former Southwest Center Mall into The Shops at RedBird, according to Foster.

Foster and his partner, Advisors Excel co-founder David Callahan, are both Kansas natives who are committed to the Topeka community, according to Foster, and reviving the West Ridge Mall is part of that involvement. Advisors Excel is one of Topeka's largest employers, with over 900 people currently.

The redevelopment of the West Ridge Mall "represents a crucial step for Topeka to further cultivate a multifaceted lifestyle experience catering to diverse demographics," according to Molly Howey, president of Go Topeka, an economic development agency.

"Moreover, local ownership ensures a customized approach tailored to our community's unique needs," she said in a statement.