In a prepared statement, Timothy E. Ellsworth, managing director in Rreef's Chicago office, says his firm is doing the joint venture deal with Tower Place developer Regent Partners for an undisclosed client at an undisclosed price. Ellsworth and Stanley Ashley of locally based Bullock Mannelly Partners Inc., who brokered the deal, couldn't be reached by GlobeSt.com's publication deadline.

Ellsworth says the properties involved in the transaction are Tower Place 100, a 611,514-sf, high-rise office building; Tower Walk, a 163,892-sf retail and entertainment center; and the AIU Building, a 60,788-sf mid-rise office structure. The 47-story, $500-million, condo-office-retail tower Regent Partners is developing separately at 3344 Peachtree St. in Buckhead is not part of the Rreef acquisition.

Rreef's Ellsworth did not disclose the value of the transaction which has been speculated at between $130 million and $250 million. However, Buckhead brokers and other real estate sources in a position to know tell GlobeSt.com the estimated price of the transaction, when it closes later this summer, will be in the $200-million range or about $239 per sf, the highest per-sf-price paid in a transaction of this kind in Atlanta this year, but not the highest on record for a class A property.

Those honors go to Cousins Properties Inc. which sold its 21-story, 423,000-sf Pinnacle office building in Buckhead to New York-based TIAA-CREF on Aug. 1, 2004 for $145 million or a record $343-per-sf price, as GlobeSt.com previously reported.

Sources intimate with the Rreef-Regents Partners deal tell GlobeSt.com Rreef's deal involved "a complicated buyout" of one of the Tower Place partners, Philadelphia-based Berwind Property Group Ltd. which owned a majority interest in Tower Place since 2002. In 1993, Regent Partners became the majority owner, sources tell GlobeSt.com.

"This was not a straight, conventional sale because the value of the office, retail and entertainment components had to be appraised and evaluated separately on a per-sf basis, along with other value-based criteria," a broker intimate with the transaction tells GlobeSt.com. "For that reason, the speculation on what the final acquisition price will be is difficult at this point."

The deal with Regent Partners is the second major transaction Rreef is doing in the metro area in the past 60 days. In a June 14 deal, Reef Americas' San Francisco office,, a wholly owned subsidiary of Germany-based Deutsch Bank, agreed to pay Post Properties Inc. $132.5 million, or $76,237 per unit, for the five-neighborhood, 155-acre Post Village complex in suburban Smyrna, as GlobeSt.com previously reported.

In May, Rreef Americas contracted to pay $78 million, or about $154.15 per sf, for Lakeside Commons, a two-building, 506,000-sf office campus in Atlanta's Central Perimeter submarket, as GlobeSt.com also previously reported.