ATLANTA-Cassidy Turley’s recently-formed full-service Southeast Retail Group is seeing plenty of action. The group is the fruit of Cassidy Turley’s September acquisition of Carter’s brokerage and property management business.

The team has inked several large deals, including the sale of three Publix-anchored centers as well as a Kohl’s-anchored shopping center. JDH Capital hired the firm to exclusively handle leasing for its seven-center, 300,000-square-foot greater Atlanta shopping center portfolio.

“Atlanta attracts more attention than any other market in the Southeast for obvious reasons,” Drew Fleming, vice president and principal of Cassidy Turley, tells GlobeSt.com. “But the port cities, Charleston and Savannah, have good economic fundamentals. The Southeast as a whole is a more attractive area for investors across the country because the yields have been traditionally higher, even for A grade properties.”

Located in Cassidy Turley’s new Atlanta office, the retail group includes vice presidents and principals Fleming and Mark Joines, along with associate vice president Jack Arnold. Fleming and Joines represent sellers in shopping center dispositions and net-lease transactions across the Southeast. Arnold’s primary focus is retail leasing and smaller unanchored strip center dispositions.

“Buyers typically want credit grocery-anchored deals because they are easy to finance and I don’t see that changing,” Fleming says. “But smaller secondary and tertiary markets where you can buy a discount-oriented shopping center with tenants typical to the area are also attractive because of the economic conditions.”

Fleming is seeing heavy competition for grocery-anchored centers. Although the gap between class A properties and the rest of the market is widening, he reports strong competition for every retail product type that hits the market, even class B and C products in secondary or tertiary markets.

“In my opinion, the only thing we’ll see differently next year is more servicer controlled assets and bank-owned assets finally being sold,” Fleming says. “But I don’t see a change fundamentally in cap rates at all next year, especially for the a-rated deals. As long as the financing is there, competition is still going to be fierce for those.”