NORTHRIDGE MALL VS WESTFIELD TOPANGA MALL SHOWDOWN | JULIAN PARK TOP REAL ESTATE AGENT

All right, so it's the holidays. Where do you go shopping? There's two main malls in the San Fernando Valley. There's a Northridge fashion center and then there is the Westfield Topanga. We're here at the Northwest fastest center right now, but I want to do a comparison between which mall was better. You might not have thought about it, but I've put a lot of thought into it for you. We're going to based on three criteria, store selection, restaurant selection and general location. Let's start with the North as Fasten center. Right. So Northern small is near and dear to my heart because I grew up here. I would come here after school and was every week E Drake shop. Now I'm older, but I still come here. Let's start with the stores here. You have your three anchor stores, Macy's and JC penny Sears. After that, I mean you have some standard middle-class stores.

You've got your old Navy, your H and N, your with 21. You know your Apple store. Other than that, that's pretty much it. It has the same stores in every mall across the nation would probably have. Anyway, so as a mall, yes it gets the job done, but if you need your niche products, this is probably not the place to come. All right, so I'm hearing the food part, which has been changing throughout the years. You have the tables here, which I've always been kind of rickety in my opinion. It's been here I think probably the longest out of anywhere here.

Japanese food, Hawaiian food, Italian and Chinese. Go over here. There's Thai subway. The selection is pretty good here. It's not that modern. These are a lot of like one off brand so you won't see anywhere else, which is kind of good. Kind of bad. Usually I like to see some more like flagship restaurants that a food court cause that's what brings people here and then eventually you start to explore the other restaurants. That's not really the case here. You don't really know a lot of them, but at the least it is in the very center of the mall, which is pretty good at some points for that. Let's keep on going. The restaurants here, you'll see the same restaurants as you do in like almost any mall, which is fine with me. You have a California pizza kitchen, which like I said, isn't like almost any mall, a Buffalo wild wings, which is good for, you know, your sports days, the yard house, it's like the quintessential ball establishment, little bar Louie here, which is a little quieter.

There's a red Robin on the other side and macaroni grill, a claim dripper in the way corner. So you kinda hit most of the spots here. They're not really anything that pop out in our world class restaurants, but they get the job done as mall. So from my rating, probably not all the roads. It's a good mall, it's in the center. And finally, while the small doesn't have an amazing or a very niche store collection that doesn't have world-class restaurants, it does have the most important thing. And that's location, location, location. It's right in the middle of the Valley, right off the Tampa plumber. Nordhoff. So if you live in the Valley, you can always come here. The problem with the Westfield Topanga, it's in the very corner. If you live in Sylmar coming to the Westfield, Topanga would take forever, at least here the North is small. Whether you live in Receda, San Porter ranch, Chatsworth, Sherman Oaks, you can still come here and you can get most of your shopping done. So location is very important and that's what gives the small top rankings on my list. That is my North, a small review. And I'll just head over to the Westfield Topanga. Come on.

All right. We're here at the Westfield Topanga mall in the corner of the San Fernando Valley. I'm a spoiler alert at the smallest, actually mostly better than new Orleans fashion center with just in the fact that it has 6,000 parking spots and a much wider area. I'll go through it right here. We're gonna start talking about the stores and places to eat and the general location, it was mostly newly renovated in 2015 which expanded considerably. But for the sake of this argument, I'm not going to talk about the villas cause that's a whole different scenario. A topic. So the Westfield Topanga there actually two places, T there's a downstairs kind of food port near the carousel. Not that anybody thinks a pair of silver cool anymore, but upstairs is the dining terrorists or the terrace as I like to call it. It's kind of fancy here compared to the North is small and you have actually a very eclectic mix.

You have kind of your basic places like Chipotle, lay like stone of it, like Panda express by Java juice, coffee bean, but yet some very unique places to now 350 degrees, which is nice. There is the entirely Philly cheese steak places. I don't know if anybody eats Philly cheese steaks in LA. There's also this kind of hybrid sushi slash cookie both ways too. And on top of that there's LaCava, which is the Brazilian steakhouse grill type of things. And you'd have a very niche pitch on the outskirts. You have cheesecake factory at red Robin, which I kind of cool and not really like go to bars. If you want to go to bars, there's a CPK and an islands, which is kinda cool right inside the mall. That's kind of a thing.

It doesn't really have like go to bars inside. You have to head over to the village to really get there. Other than that, I still get the thumbs up to the Western because of a wider variety. There's more than 30 places inside the mall, which definitely beats story selection. What are the most important things when it comes to a mall? If you have more than 300 stores here spread out over 2 million square feet, that automatically trumps the Northern small. You have your niche markets like the high school and they loves urban Outfitters, but the grownup up in the, he likes Peloton. Yeah. They have a Peloton showroom here and they also used to have a Tesla's show around here too. If you're feeling like you can spend, you have a bunch of designers stores. You got Gucci, Burberry, and [inaudible] at the time. How many you should spend on those?

You should buy or buy real estate. You have your anchor stores here and your Macy's or JC patties. Yeah, H and M's has more stores than you could possibly want. It actually forces you to spend money coming here. All right, so the thing with the location here is that yes, it is in the corner. Let's be real. The 27 freeway is not a freeway. Hang a Boulevard. It's just a, the one-on-one is nearby or, but the one-on-one is packed all the time. So this one does get a thumbs down for locations. None of the small does trunk because it's right in the middle. And so that's what it comes down to. If you're like me and you're just going to go shopping quickly, the door, the smallest bedroom, it's smaller and it has less stores, but Hey, at least you don't have to go all the way to the corner of the San Fernando Valley. And after living in Sylmar and I'm trying to go to the Westfield Topanga, that's like a 45 minutes, right? So with that being said, this is a better mall for food stores, amenities, but location just isn't that great. And that is the honest, truthful from Daniel Valley. Give us a call and we're the number one San Fernando Valley real estate resource. Thank you.