Equity One Bids for 17 Centers

Dim Vastgoed owns 17 shopping centers in Florida, Georgia, Alabama and the Carolinas. This year alone, it added Grayson Village Shopping Center and Loganville Town Center in Loganville, GA; Freehome Village in Canton, GA; and Eustis Village in Eustis, FL to its portfolio.

It currently has approximately 6.9 million shares outstanding, which trade on Eurolist by Euronext Amsterdam. The stock closed on Sept. 9 at $17.90 USD a share. At that price, an acquisition cost would be just over $123.5 million. A call to Dim Vastgoed was not returned by deadline.

This bid follows Equity One's early August offer to acquire Port Washington, NY-based Cedar Shopping Centers for about $380 million. The offer was withdrawn less than a week later for lack of a quick response, according to Chaim Katzman, Equity One's chairman and CEO.

Today, Equity One also completed two acquisitions. It paid $3.6 million for two adjacent development parcels aggregating 11.2 acres in Canton, GA, where Dim Vastgoed has a center, and $5.2 million for the 32,737-sf Banco Popular building on 2.8 acres here on Miami Gardens Drive.

The Georgia parcels are located on Highway 20 at the entrance to the new 614-acre River Green residential development under way north of Atlanta. Equity One plans to develop a supermarket-anchored center and a smaller center on the land. The Banco Popular building was completed in 1971 and is 100% leased. It is adjacent to Equity One's Shops at Skylake center where the developer is completing construction of a new TJ Maxx store. The acquisition is seen as "a candidate for future redevelopment opportunities," according to a company statement. The current Equity One retail portfolio consists of 127 grocery-anchored shopping centers, seven drug store-anchored centers, 45 retail-anchored centers and eight development parcels.