The story
As retail development in the United States shifted away from downtowns with the growth of suburbia after World War II, some major department stores such as Sears moved into the business of developing malls in which to place new anchor tenant locations. Homart Development Company was founded in 1959 for the purpose of building regional shopping malls for Sears. The "Homart" brand name had been used by Sears for many years before the development company was founded.
Seminary South Shopping Center in Fort Worth was their first project.
By 1971, Homart was operating nine regional shopping locations, and had numerous others in development. It became the nation's second largest mall developer, and by 1992 it was reported that Homart had developed 80 malls with over 75,000,000 square feet (7,000,000 m2) of retail space. By 1994, it was also operating 36 of those developed malls.
In November 1994, Sears announced that it planned to sell off Homart as part of a restructuring. General Growth Properties completed an acquisition of Homart in late 1995 in a transaction valued at $1.85 billion, then one of the biggest real estate deals in history. Homart also owned a number of office buildings which were also sold in 1995.
From Wikipedia’s article on Homart Development Company, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3