By Peter Hartman, partner, Hartman Simons
Around every Atlanta corner is another grocery store, coffee shop and restaurant. Can we call any of these Irreplaceable Corners™? Absolutely.
This summer AmREIT, a retail real estate company, known to many as The Irreplaceable Corner™ Company, entered the Atlanta market and added two properties to its portfolio: Alpharetta Commons, a Publix-anchored center in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta, and Brookwood Village, a CVS-anchored shopping center in Buckhead. Hartman Simons associate Will Lovell and of-counsel Stephanie Skidmore helped me represent AmREIT in both the loan and acquisition for Alpharetta Commons. We all found it enjoyable to work with a company so active in the market, and thanks to my great team, it was an extremely smooth transaction.
Houston-based AmREIT has a strategic approach to acquisitions and the 94,544-square-foot Alpharetta Commons embodies all the qualities of the company’s target asset– grocery-anchored center located in an affluent area. The multi-tenant shopping center is also 100 percent leased.
According to Scan/US, Inc., the shopping center benefits from more than 81,000 people living within a three-mile radius of the property with an average household income of more than $146,000. In addition, more than 3,600 businesses are located nearby including IBM, General Electric Co., Verizon, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Siemens.
In a recent press release regarding the Alpharetta Commons acquisition, H. Kerr Taylor, AmREIT’s CEO, stated, “We are excited to expand our presence in Atlanta with the second Irreplaceable Corner™ in the past 90 days. For over a quarter of a century our focus has been to own, manage and create value on what we call ‘Irreplaceable Corners’—affluent, densely populated submarkets within major, gateway cities.”
AmREIT boasts on its website that it operates in five of the most desirable growth markets in the U.S. It is exciting to see Atlanta included on this short and prestigious list. Now the Hartman Simons team just needs to find time to head up to the center’s Taco Mac and celebrate the closing!