Buckhead Land Buy Jumpstarts Estimated $250M Mixed-Use Project

A ceremonial groundbreaking is scheduled for May 9. Completion of the first phase is anticipated in April 2007. Pope & Land Inc. of Atlanta sold the land to Cousins.

The site is at the intersection of Peachtree and Piedmont roads. Cousins president and CEO Tom Bell declined to disclose the purchase price of the land and the estimated development cost of the entire project. Local construction industry sources, however, tell GlobeSt.com a comparable venture couldn't be built today for less than $250 million. The construction sources base their estimate on a hard construction cost of a minimum $150 per sf for the class A office space; up to $90 per sf for the retail and restaurant components; and up to $90,000 per unit for the residential units.

Area industrial brokers tell GlobeSt.com Cousins paid at least $1 million per acre, or a total $10 million, for the 9.9-acre parcel in Downtown Buckhead. Other Downtown Buckhead parcels have gone for $2 million and $3 million per acre in the last three years, according to GlobeSt.com research.

"It should now be clear to the market, to our customers and to those considering new office space in Buckhead that this project is going to happen," says Bell. "With our unbeatable location, outstanding design and increasingly impressive list of commitments, we expect this building to be a success worthy of Buckhead and consistent with Cousins' track record of adding cutting edge office buildings to the Atlanta skyline."

"The project's new and exciting restaurants and street-level retail will reinforce and enhance Buckhead's reputation for high-quality development." The CEO says he will disclose names of key tenants and the name of the building in a few weeks.

Durham, NC-based Duda Paine Architects is the design architect for the project. Duda Paine's previous work with Cousins includes Gateway Village in Charlotte, NC and Frost Bank Tower in Austin, TX.

Downtown Atlanta office brokers tell GlobeSt.com Cousins is taking a calculated risk with its newest office-retail project. "While the retail and restaurant portion has a better than 50-50 chance for success, the office component at this time isn't on real solid ground," says a broker familiar with Buckhead office leasing.

According to the latest data from locally based Colliers Cauble Co., the 36 buildings that make up Buckhead's 9.76-million-sf class A inventory show an overall vacancy of 16.6% and a direct vacancy of 13.9%. There is 1.62-million-sf of class A space available for rent at an average asking base rent of $23.75 per sf.

The class A Buckhead market had total net absorption in the last audited period of 2004 of 529,858 sf. There was only 202,080 sf of new construction under way.