The long-vacant Summit Place Mall in Oakland County will be completely demolished this spring to make way for a possible future business park, the site's owner and developer said Wednesday.

The entire 1.4 million-square-foot shopping mall in Waterford is scheduled to be razed beginning in April. The demolition is expected to happen quickly and could be mostly done in one month.

The newly vacant land would then be renamed the Oakland County Business Center, and marketed for mostly business and commercial developments, according to the announcement by ARi-El Enterprises, a Southfield-based real estate firm.

New buildings would rise from the site once businesses commit to going in there, said Larry Emmons, a managing director at real estate firm JLL, which is handling the project's leasing.

"We are not going to do any speculative construction," he said. "We are welcoming all uses, all occupants."

The new development could eventually be up to 1 million square feet in size, the announcement said.

Emmons said he anticipates interest in the site from engineering and other auto-related businesses.

“We are quite positive that it’s going to be a very high-end use that you would typically find in Oakland County," he said.

ARi-El Enterprises bought the abandoned shopping mall last fall for an undisclosed sum from its former California-based owner.

The mall's vacant Sears is a separate parcel, owned by DTE Energy, which intends to tear it down this year to build an operations center.

The Oakland County Business Center project would make use of a 10-year commercial tax abatement as well as the site's status as an Opportunity Zone.

The Opportunity Zone program incentivizes investment in lower-income areas by offering investors discounts off capital gains taxes on money that they invest in projects within a designated zone.

ARi-El has until September 2019 to begin demolition of the mall under the terms of last year's land sale.

Summit Place Mall was originally called Pontiac Mall when it opened in 1962 as Michigan's first enclosed shopping mall.

It underwent at least three renovations in its lifetime and featured about 150 stores by the late 1980s and early 1990s including Hudson’s, Montgomery Ward, JCPenney, Kohl’s and Sears.

But vacant storefronts proliferated by the early 2000s and the mall closed in September 2009, followed soon by anchor stores JCPenney and Macy’s. The last anchor, Sears, shut its doors in December 2014.

More:Dying Eastland and Midland malls needed a hero. Did they find him?

More:Here are metro Detroit's healthy, dying and dead malls

Contact JC Reindl at 313-222-6631 or jcreindl@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jcreindl. Read more on business and sign up for our business newsletter.