(For more retail coverage, click GlobeSt.com/RETAIL.)

TAYLOR, MI-A long-time dark Kmart will be, within the next year, the site of a new Home Depot USA, as the home improvement store sets up as anchor tenant at Taylor Plaza. Home Depot, headquartered in Atlanta, has signed an 11.64-acre ground lease with retail REIT Ramco-Gershenson of Farmington Hills, which owns and leases the retail shopping center. The center is located at the intersection of Telegraph and Goddard roads.

Home Depot's plan is to demolish the old Kmart store, which, according to Chuck Bludworth, Ramco's vice president of development, has been empty for about two or three years. Once the former structure is demolished, Home Depot will build a new retail facility, scheduled to open during fall 2006.

"Home Depot will be handling all the construction on this project, and I believe they're looking at maybe breaking ground by late spring of 2006," Bludworth tells GlobeSt.com. The primarily vacant 122,000-sf Taylor Plaza was built in 1970 and acquired by Ramco in 1996. Specific lease information on the transaction could not be obtained by press time.