The buyers, institutions and private investors, are there for the picking, says Adam T. Howells, director of Dallas-based Holliday Fenoglio Fowler LP, who is pushing the product to market for Hunt Properties Co., the Dallas-headquartered general partner of the private investment group that owns the four-property Collin Creek Shopping Center portfolio. "I'd be surprised if we didn't have 60 or 70 memorandums and I'd be surprised if we didn't have 15 or 20 offers when the marketing's over," he tells GlobeSt.com.

Howells and James C. Batjer, Holliday's senior director in Dallas, are marketing the no-ask package, which most likely will sell as a whole. Two of the retail assets front Central Expressway and two front 15th Street...and all four back up to the Indianapolis-based Rouse Co.'s 1.3-million-sf Collin Creek Mall, where the sales mark is $375 per sf.

Howells says Hunt's selling because it "feels like it's the right time." That right time translates into a cap rate of 8% to 8.5% in a marketplace of limited available supply, plentiful buyers and an expiring three-to-five-year hold plan. He says it's time to either refinance or sell.

Howells believes Hunt's take-home pay for the no-debt portfolio will draw out more would-be sellers of prime retail properties in North Texas. "Once sellers see these highly aggressive cap rates, they're going to have to check it out," he says. Right now, there are only two class A properties, each 200,000 sf, on the market in Dallas-Fort Worth, according to Howells' inside track.

The package, built in three phases between 1966 and 1992, is coming to market with an empty 108,000-sf Kmart, vacated last week. The big box shares a 202,000-sf center with Hobby Lobby. A 75,000-sf store is subleased to Hemisphere Furniture by Wal-Mart, which has eight years to go on the master lease. A 105,000-sf power center is 100% occupied by Ashley Furniture, Cost Plus and Office Max. The fourth center is a 98%-leased, 66,000-sf property with Drug Emporium as the anchor and the balance, inline. The big box tenants are delivering $10 per sf to $14 per sf and inline shops are bringing in $18 per sf to $22 per sf, according to Howells.

Howells says Hunt's brokers are talking to tenants now to fill the Kmart block. As the saying goes "in a perfect world," he'd like to be sitting down at a closing table in four months with a buyer for the portfolio and a tenant to fill the big box block.

Instant Insights /

481,565-SF, Class A Retail Portfolio Hits Market

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