Macerich adds a hotel to FlatIron Crossing's mixed-use bet

A 160,000-square-foot Dick's House of Sport will be nearly twice the size of the entire 90,000 square feet of retail, dining and entertainment planned for FlatIron Crossing's repositioning, and that ratio frames the 150-room, still-unbranded hotel Macerich is adding to the Broomfield regional mall just north of Denver. The updated plan, according to Connect CRE, also includes 347 apartments, and the hotel, with rooftop amenities and an anticipated fall 2028 opening, will likely push the project's total cost to about $300 million; Macerich expects to reveal the brand by year end, per the Denver Business Journal.

The residential piece is furthest along: Crescent Communities' Novel HiFi has topped out halfway through construction and will deliver its first 45 units next summer, while the Dick's House of Sport, replacing the existing Dick's Sporting Goods, opens in summer 2027. That single-tenant footprint makes experiential retail the load-bearing commercial component, and the apartments and hotel are what supply the customers the smaller retail roster is meant to serve.

Read the delivery schedule against that and the order looks backwards: the apartments and the big-box anchor arrive before the hotel, leaving the retail, dining and entertainment space selling into existing mall traffic for roughly two years, until new residents and hotel guests exist to be counted as demand.

The 347 apartments outnumber the 150 hotel keys by better than two to one, and they are the part of a $300 million program a buyer would underwrite first; mall parking fields are among the few remaining infill apartment sites whose utilities, traffic counts and approvals are already settled, which is why the rental building sits beside a working mall instead of on raw dirt. Crescent Communities is working the other side of that trade at the same time: its Nashville project, covered here in September, is a 313-unit ground-up build whose return hinges on how fast it leases. FlatIron instead starts with traffic already passing the door, an advantage that matters more with new supply arriving while rent growth sits stalled, the split this publication has argued is multifamily's central pricing question.

Two things to watch from here: whether Macerich names a hotel brand by December, and how quickly Novel HiFi's first 45 units fill. The brand will say who Macerich thinks its customer is; the lease-up will say whether the later phases arrive on schedule.