The owner of the nearly vacant Sunrise Mall plans to demolish the building and is seeking Nassau County’s approval Thursday to subdivide the Massapequa property, according to plans submitted to government agencies.

It is a major move toward a revamp of the long-struggling mall by Sunrise Mall Holdings LLC, the joint real estate venture that said it would redevelop the property after buying it at a steep discount in 2020.

Sunrise Mall Holdings declined to disclose more-specific plans for the mall Wednesday but it is seeking the Nassau County Planning Commission's approval of a request to subdivide the 77-acre property into four parcels.   

The planning commission will hold a hearing at 10 a.m. Thursday on the subdivision request.

"The application now before the Nassau County Planning Commission is a procedural process designed to subdivide parcels for future uses at the property. Any development applications for those uses will be submitted to the appropriate governing bodies with applicable notice and opportunity for public comment," a Sunrise Mall Holdings spokesman said in a statement last week.

There also are plans to demolish the mall, including the freestanding former Sears Auto Center and a garage/maintenance building, according to a letter Sunrise Mall Holdings’ attorney, Judy Lynn Simoncic of Uniondale law firm Forchelli Deegan Terrana LLP, sent to the Town of Oyster Bay Planning and Development Department.

Dated April 2, the letter requests that the department send a zoning compliance letter to the county planning commission as part of the requirements to get the subdivision approved. The mall is in the town's light industrial district.

Sunrise Mall Holdings bought the mall from Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, a Paris-based company, in December 2020 for $29.7 million, a steep discount from the $143 million — not adjusted for inflation — that the property sold for in 2005.

Urban Edge Properties, a Manhattan-based real estate investment trust, is the managing member of Sunrise Mall Holdings, with an 82.5% interest.

Shortly after the mall’s 2020 sale was announced, the then-new owner said it would redevelop the property. But more than four years later, no development has taken place and the only tenant is Dick’s Sporting Goods. One of the last two tenants, Macy’s, an anchor that opened the same day as the mall, Aug. 30, 1973, recently closed.

In February 2022, when there were about 50 tenants left at the mall, including anchors Sears, HomeGoods and Dave & Buster’s, Urban Edge announced that no tenants’ leases would be renewed, “setting the stage for the company to evaluate options for its redevelopment.”

For years, rumors have abounded about the intended reuses for the mall, with speculation including everything from an Amazon warehouse to an NYU Langone health facility to a mixed-use apartment and retail development.

Neither Amazon nor NYU Langone responded to Newsday’s inquiries in April about whether they had plans to lease or buy any of the mall property.

In January, Jeffrey S. Mooallem, executive vice president and chief operating officer at Urban Edge, told Newsday that the redevelopment plan for the mall still had not been finalized but Macy’s exit would create more opportunities to revamp the property.

“This is a large piece of land, so it does not necessarily have to be just one thing. There are ... different components of it that could be developed, different components could be sold, different uses,” he said.

The 1.2 million-square-foot mall used to be a bustling property but, like many malls across the country, it lost stores over the last decade due to growing competition from online retailers. The COVID-19 pandemic, which started in March 2020, exacerbated the problems of enclosed retail centers.

Sunrise Mall’s vacancy rate was 35% in January 2021, Urban Edge told Newsday that month.

By comparison, the average mall vacancy rate in the fourth quarter of 2020 was 5.8% on Long Island, 4.2% in New York State and 6.4% in the United States, according to CoStar, a Washington, D.C.-based commercial real estate information provider.