What's new at Redwood Marketplace?

The Tesla chargers are finally live...plus some possible futures for the marketplace

A red Tesla charges at one of the bays in the Tesla charging station at Redwood Marketplace in north Sebastopol.

A year after they were installed, the Tesla chargers at Redwood Marketplace are finally live. The construction that was clogging up the entrance to the shopping center for the last few months was PG&E finalizing the electrical work that was needed to supply the chargers.

“We’ve been kind of waiting on PG&E to finish their work. They just did that,” said Justin Cerri, a representative for Wright Contracting, which owns the Redwood Marketplace.

Cerri said the chargers are owned by Tesla, which rents the space in the parking lot from Wright Contracting.

Information on the Redwood Marketplace charging station from the Tesla charger website.

What’s happening with the rest of the shopping center?

According to Cerri, “The future plans for the site are, if we were ever able to purchase the CVS portion of the site, we would like to tear down that whole site and build apartments or mixed-use and tie it in with the rest of the shopping center. That’s the dream.”

There’s just one hitch.

“CVS still owns their portion of the property, and they are wanting too much money for it,” he said. “As far as we’re concerned, we think we’re the only ones that are interested in buying it because no one’s going to want to buy that and then have us as a partner, we wouldn’t think. We make the most sense to be the buyer, but it has to be at the right price.”

The CVS property is currently for sale for $2,999,999.

“We think one to one and a half,” Cerri said, “so, yes, we’re quite a bit apart.”

In the meantime, there are several spaces in the shopping center needing tenants.

“We have three vacancies out there,” Cerri said. “We have the old Mary’s space, the pad building on the corner—that’s the old West America—and then the old Exchange Bank space. Those are three vacancies we’ve been trying to lease for the last, gosh, well, the West America space has been vacant for probably 10-plus years and then Mary's and Exchange Bank are more recent.”

Cerri said they’d been getting a lot of interest in some of these spaces of late, however.

“We hired a new realtor, Nick Egide with Meridian Commercial. He’s been touring the spaces with a lot of different people—yoga studios, breweries, Redwood Credit Union. So hopefully, we’ll be able to land one of these soon.”

“Another future thing—we would love to have Oliver’s in there. So once Lucky’s lease expires—that’s in 2035—that’s kind of the dream too.”

In response to the suggestion of a Trader Joe’s, Cerri said, “I’m sure that that would also be welcome. All I know is that the owner of Oliver’s has expressed interest.”