Silver Spring's Ellsworth Place Trades for $92M

The sale also included the retail center but also air rights for a fully-entitled office building.

Ellsworth Place

SILVER SPRING, MD–Nashville-based GBT Realty, along with its partners, has acquired Ellsworth Place from a joint venture between Rockwood Capital and Petrie Richardson Ventures for $92 million. Besides the 350,000-square foot, recently repositioned five-story urban retail center, the sale also included the air rights for a fully entitled office building up to 250,000 square feet, which would be constructed on top of the center.

GBT’s partners in the deal are Cambridge, Mass.-based Equity Resource Investments and Chilean investor Avante Financial Group. Financing was provided by Rialto. NKF’s Robert Griffin, Geoffrey Millerd, Mat Adler, Christian Brannelly and Chris Huesgen repped the building owner and NKF’s Joe Donato and Maury Zanoff secured financing for the new owners. No additional transaction details are available.

“The strength of the Silver Spring market along with the prominence of Ellsworth Place significantly increases the overall strength of our Capital Holdings portfolio of value-add and core-plus commercial properties across the Sun Belt and Mid-Atlantic,” Scott Porter, managing director, Capital Holdings, GBT Realty, says in a prepared statement.

Ellsworth Place is anchored by by Marshalls, TJ Maxx, Ross Dress for Less, Burlington and Five Below. Dave & Buster’s tops the regional center that also includes national brands such as Forever 21 Red, Guitar Center and Foot Locker. The center is 93% leased.

“This acquisition affords GBT with a tremendous opportunity to expand within this thriving downtown market,” Porter also says. He adds the company expects to  renegotiate leases to current market levels as they expire.

The addition of Ellsworth Place brings the Capital Holdings portfolio to over $160 million. The firm is targeting primarily under-performing, discount-focused, grocery-anchored and service-oriented assets throughout the Sun Belt and Mid-Atlantic regions. GBT expects to acquire $1 billion of retail centers from institutional as well as private owners over the next eight to 10 years.