Only 5 Sears stores remain in the U.S.

Summary

A decade after an investment firm was created to help save Sears from its inevitable demise, both are now in their last gasps.Five Sears stores are still operating in the country, but they won’t be around much longer, industry experts predict.Neither will Seritage Growth Properties, the real estate investment trust created to cash in on the value of the retailer’s properties. It abandoned its somewhat audacious plan to turn Sears’s rich real estate holdings into dazzling mixed-use properties. Today, Seritage is offloading the last of its assets as it pays down a $1.6 billion term loan from Warren E. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.“The goal is to sell the remaining Seritage assets as quickly and profitably as possible, but we are also very open to an alternative transaction that could enhance shareholder value,” Adam Metz, chief executive of Seritage, said in an interview.The winding down of both companies in tandem brings to an end a two-decade saga that the hedge fund magnate Edward S. Lampert started when he bought Sears in 2005.When Mr. Lampert combined Sears with Kmart, which he had bought out of bankruptcy in 2003, investors were betting that the retailers would be better off dead and their land repurposed. At the time, Sears owned most of its more than 3,400 stores. Sears’s market value soared past $20 billion in those early days of Mr. Lampert’s ownership as the company slashed costs and investors anticipated cashing in on its valuable holdings.Within a decade, though, Sears was flailing and Mr. Lampert had embarked on a plan to sell hundreds of stores to Seritage. The fund’s shares, now trading at less than $4, hit more than $50 in the years after Seritage was formed.So what went wrong with Mr. Lampert’s big promise?Bad timing and an egregious conflict of interest involving Mr. Lampert at the helm of both entities are to blame, industry experts say. Through Mr. Lampert’s hedge fund, ESL Investments, which was a major lender to Sears, he was the retailer’s bigg...