Unpopular opinion: the county assessor's website ruined dead mall hunting for me
I used to spend whole Saturdays driving to places like the old Century Plaza in Birmingham just to see if the lights were still on. Now I pull up property records from my couch and know a mall is dead before I even leave the house, which honestly takes the fun out of it. Last weekend I mapped out 4 spots in 20 minutes and skipped all of them since the records showed active leases. Does anyone else miss just showing up and hoping for the best, or am I being weird about this?
Honestly the record checking is the better way to do it. Wasting a whole tank of gas to drive two hours and find a mall with a thriving Bath and Body Works is a terrible use of a Saturday. The real fun is in the research itself, digging through tax records and seeing when a JCPenney stopped paying its lease is its own kind of detective work. Showing up blind just means you end up eating a sad pretzel in a mall that still has a Spencer's and a guy selling phone cases.