A big mall deal in Aventura ends feud between two neighboring shopping centers
Customers like Eli Gorin venture into Aventura to shop and eat. Perhaps it’s a visit to the sprawling mall for a movie and a holiday gift. Then maybe lunch at the smaller retail complex next door.
But they can’t get from one shopping center to the other without walking through a pedestrian unfriendly maze outside to reach the unconnected entrances and exits.
That could soon change.
Aventura Mall’s owners closed a $131 million deal to buy what was known as the Esplanade. The deal ends years of lawsuits and a bitter separation that perplexed and irritated customers who frequented both complexes during their shopping excursion.
Turnberry Associates and Simon Properties, will now run the shopping center next door. Despite the marriage, it will continue to be a separate entity with its own name. But shoppers will likely see changes that include better access from one complex to the other.
“When they opened, the access was confusing to find where to park and even worse how to actually enter the Esplanade from the mall,” Gorin said in an interview with the Miami Herald. “We would have to walk outside of Bella Luna in the parking lots, cut through the grass and walk up the ramp. Really odd.“
The transaction between Seritage, which is liquidating and selling its assets including the Esplanade, and the Aventura Mall’s owners closed on Nov. 25. The sale was announced Monday by Turnberry principal Harrison Soffer, the 28-year-old son of Turnberry CEO and chairman Jackie Soffer with whom he runs the mall.
“For us as a company, the deal was simple,” Harrison Soffer said in an email interview with the Miami Herald on Tuesday. “Aventura Mall has never been stronger. Vacancy is virtually nonexistent. Rental rates are at all-time highs. The deal is really a testament to the vitality of the Aventura submarket, Miami’s broader market tailwinds, and most evidently, our teams’ capabilities. As such, we felt this was the right time to explore a conversation with Seritage.”
The Esplanade has been renamed The Abbey at Aventura and has new signs on the site at Northeast 195th Street and Biscayne Boulevard, Soffer said. A Google map already identifies the shopping and eating complex with the new name.
A rocky relationship in Aventura
The Abbey at Aventura features more than 40 shops, and includes restaurants STK Steakhouse and Joey and recent 2025 summer and fall new tenants in nearly 55,000 square feet of new space. New tenants include Tremble fitness studio, Pura Vida Miami and Salt & Straw. A Lego Store that had left the Aventura Mall next door is also in The Abbey.
The center was originally a 12-acre plot that housed a Sears and a Sears Auto Center that connected to Aventura Mall, and their parking lots. After Sears was torn down in 2017, Esplanade rose and opened on the site next to the mall in 2023.
But the neighbors weren’t really neighbors.
The independently Seritage-owned Esplanade was never affiliated with the established Aventura Mall mall next door, even though they shared the same entrance and access roads. And the relationship was prickly from the start.
Soon after 2014, when Seritage began unloading its Sears properties and envisioned the upstart complex, the mall vs. mall showdown began.
In 2016, Seritage Growth Properties sued Aventura Mall over its then $214 million expansion plan, which Seritage called “a land grab.” The case was settled.
And despite having a common road looping around both malls, each center denied shoppers and diners easy access from one to the other.
“I’ve been in the Aventura area my whole life, so I have seen the mall grow over the years and when they closed Sears to build out Esplanade, I don’t think many people were aware that land didn’t belong to Turnberry, especially since Sears had direct access to the mall,” shopper Gorin, 46, said in a text interview with the Miami Herald.
The concept of Esplanade with its mixed use space in the heart or Aventura with retail, restaurants and entertainment appealed to customers of both malls.
“They really do complement each other,” Gorin said.
But if you wanted to venture out of the AMC Aventura 24 movie theater on Aventura Mall’s third level after a screening of “Wicked: For Good” for an artisanal doughnut at The Salty next door at Esplanade, the journey was harder than it looked.
“We once had dinner with friends from out of town who don’t know how to get around the mall so well and what should have been a good five-minute walk from where they were, turned out to be more than 30 minutes. I do hope they open up an access from the mall and get rid of the grass partition in the parking areas. If not, it’s absolutely pointless,” Gorin said.
With the new deal, Aventura Mall leaders say they will be working on shopper access between the two complexes, even though they will keep separate identities.
“We are currently looking at a variety of ways to enhance the consumer experience for people enjoying both the adjacent properties,” Soffer said. “This will include adding pedestrian access at both exterior entrances adjacent to North Italia/Jarana, as well as the entrance adjacent to Joey’s.”
Growth of Aventura Mall
Aventura Mall, judged the best mall in America by USA Today readers last June, first opened in April 1983 with JCPenney and Lord & Taylor as anchors. Macy’s and Sears joined later in 1983. JCPenney and Macy’s remain nearly 43 years later.
More than 30 million annual visitors shop at the mall, near the Miami-Dade and Broward border. The mall has expanded three times, most recently, a $214 million investment in 2017, which saw its Any Mall U.S.A. food court scrapped in favor of a higher-end food hall.
Aventura has more 300 stores, 50 restaurants, art installations, dog parks — and attractions like German artist Carsten Höller’s 93-foot-high Aventura Slide Tower.
Aventura Mall boasts several firsts: The Eataly taste of Italy food hall near Nordstrom’s opened its first Florida outlet in June. Silbón, a Spanish-style menswear, womenswear and chilldren’s clothing brand from Córdoba, Spain, with a cult following and more than 150 stores across Europe and Mexico, opens its first U.S. location on Dec 4.
Coming together — but apart
How will the new Aventura Mall / The Abbey relationship work?
“Turnberry is currently managing, programming and leasing space in the center,” Harrison Soffer, the company’s principal, said of the arrangement with the rebranded The Abbey at Aventura.
“The name is a nod to Abigail Road — the ring road around The Abbey at Aventura and Aventura Mall,” Soffer said.
That road is just east of the often-gridlocked Biscayne Boulevard at 195th Street, between busy Ives Dairy Road and Miami Gardens Drive.
MORE: Why is Aventura Mall both loved and loathed? It comes down to more than shopping
Soffer is high on the new two-mall arrangement.
“We know our customers do more than just shop,” he said. “They are looking for experiences and places that they can connect with and find their community.”
This story was originally published December 3, 2025 at 10:59 AM.
