DANVILLE — New owners of the Village Mall are wasting no time drawing new tenants into their new development.

Jeremiah Sunden is acquisitions and leasing director with Tabani Group, who wholly owns its subsidiary, T Danville, LLC, who purchased the Village Mall earlier in May. He said action is really busy for the site.

Sunden said all different types of retail concepts are currently considering space at the mall.

“Everything is going very well,” Sunden said. “There is a healthy amount of activity for the mall.”

Sunden said signs are encouraging for the site. His group attended the International Council of Shopping Centers convention in Las Vegas this past week, which drew a crowd of 30,000 business people. The annual convention is where many deals are made — both to build shopping centers and to lure retail tenants.

Sunden said they planned to meet with companies from all over the world.

The Tabani Group now owns 3 million square feet worth of retail space with the acquisition of the Village Mall. Its holdings are specialized in malls and shopping centers.

One of the first things retailers look at when considering a new market are the leakage numbers in that area. They can be a telling sign for a retailer hoping to fill a void in an untapped market. Leakage is the number of shopping dollars spent elsewhere by local residents.

Vicki Haugen, president and CEO of Vermilion Advantage, said the leakage report is a “primary indicator” for retailers investigating their potential success in an area.

In our area, within a five-mile radius of the Village Mall, there are a number of areas where demand exceeds supply. Electronics stores and home furnishings stores have high leakage numbers.

Sporting goods also showed a pretty high leakage number, but there should be a change there soon. Dunham’s Sports has signed on as an anchor store in the Village Mall and will fulfill some of the demand that was seeping out of the area.

Haugen said an example of a retailer turning around the numbers is in the building materials sector. Locally, leakage numbers weren’t yet being followed when Lowe’s and then Menards came in years ago, but national retailers have used the statistics for years.

Haugen said they can still tell that a major difference was made in the area when the two big-box home improvement stores opened. Within a few years of the openings, sales tax dollars increased 111 percent. And, numbers now show little leakage in the building materials group.

Haugen noted that apparel also shows leakage in that five-mile radius of the mall area.

The Kohl’s development is planned for the former K’s Merchandise site, which will hold not only the major clothing retailer, but also a junior anchor retail store. There is space for an outlot, too, that can be a restaurant or other retail store, and room for future retail expansion.

All of that, combined with what is in the works at the mall, will help to keep shoppers in Vermilion County and eventually bring more here.

“Consumers like choice,” Haugen said. “You might go out of your market just for increased variety or choice, but that has compounding impact.”

Haugen said once a consumer is driven out of their market for even just one item, the effect of that choice multiplies. The customer generally will buy more than that one item at the store they visited outside of their home base and will visit other stores, too. And while they’re there, they might go out to dinner before they come back home.

But, as our retail market becomes stronger and we offer more choice, trends show that not only will we be better apt to keep our own dollars local, but we will begin to draw in from the fringes, outside of our own market — Crawfordsville, Ind., northern Edgar County and other like areas where their driving distance is about the same to shopping hubs where they are fleeing to now.

Many in southern Vermilion County continually question the prospect of big retail moving farther south, hoping it will happen one day.

Haugen said that action on North Vermilion Street from the Village Mall up to Wal-Mart is a result of retailers looking to be in that mile to mile-and-a-half zone.

She did say that there are projects going on outside the limits of the City of Danville and they are within existing facilities.