ATLANTA (July 21, 2010) - Investment sales are being talked about all over sunny, sweltering Atlanta today - and the chatter includes Houston, Redskins' country, New York and our own Midtown.
Atlantans are playing a role in Houston's investment sales market. Goddard Investment Group of Buckhead has hired Eastdil Secured (no surprise here) to market Heritage Plaza, a 1.2 million-square-foot office tower in downtown Houston, according to Real Estate Report. Goddard, whose namesake Bob Goddard also is independent chairman of Post Properties, acquired the property in 2005 for about $130 million. Real Estate Alerts says the tower now is valued at as much as $310 million - thanks to the improvements Goddard made and the new tenants it attracted.
Up the East Coast, in Northern Virginia, Northrop is expected to buy (not lease, buy) an office tower in Falls Church for its new headquarters. The company announced in April that it would move its headquarters from Southern California to Northern Virginia, aka Redskins country. An article in The Wall Street Journal today supposes that Northrop decided to buy instead of lease because of coming changes in accounting rules that will make companies record leases as liabilities (instead of an expense) on their balance sheet.
And in New York, WSJ reporter Anton Troianovski reports that Atlanta-based Ackerman & Co. lost $2 million in its sale of 9000 Central Park (at left) to Cox Enterprises. Ackerman bought the Central Perimeter tower in 2007 for $33 million and sold it this year for $31 million. In a refreshingly honest assessment of the investment, Ackerman President Kris Miller tells Troianovski, "It turns out we were wrong" about the potential upside of the 205,000-square-foot building that would be about half-vacant when the firm bought it.
And finally, back home, Atlanta's commercial real estate industry is abuzz with word of a high-profile firm closing in on a deal to acquire Campanile. That's the former BellSouth headquarters at 14th & Peachtree in Midtown being marketed by Eastdil Secured. And, the buyer won't be Brookdale Group as Skyline Views speculated last week.
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