Novare Group Plans Biggest Downtown Residential Project

The undertaking is expected to open in 2006 with 1,015 condominium units in a 35-story tower and four-story low-rise building; a 10-story, 100-room hotel; and 30,000 sf of retail space. A fall ground-breaking is tentatively scheduled.

The site is across Alexander Street from the planned new Southern Co. headquarters, being developed by locally based Barry Cos., and a few blocks from the $200-million Georgia Aquarium location. The Southern building and the aquarium are tentatively scheduled to open in 2005.

The Novare Group project is expected to create a new Downtown residential pocket, stretching from North Avenue to Interstate 20, local independent planners monitoring Downtown's growth tell GlobeSt.com. They estimate all of Downtown has about 12,000 existing homes.

Local construction industry estimators not affiliated with the project tell GlobeSt.com the 1,015 condos will probably have a hard construction cost of $200,000 per unit or a total $203 million. The 30,000 sf of retail could be built for as low as $60 per sf or about $1.8 million. And the 100 hotel rooms may command a hard cost of $150,000 per room or about $15 million.

For Novare Group, the Centennial Olympic Park project is only one on a full plate of development jobs. Among them is a scheduled June ground-breaking with locally based Wood Partners on 404 condominiums and 101 hotel rooms in a single, 26-story structure overlooking the Intersate 75/85 connector road behind the new 21-story SouthTrust Building at the Atlanta Station redevelopment in Midtown. Completion is scheduled for fall 2005.

The Novare-Wood joint venture is also developing Spire, a 28-story condo community that broke ground in March at 860 Peachtree St. in Midtown, and City Center, a 29-story Buckhead condo enterprise scheduled to start construction in September at Piedmont Road and Peachtree Street. The partners also built the Metropolis condos community in Midtown.