Pope & Land Sells 100%-Occupied Decatur Plaza

ATLANTA—Decatur Plaza has traded hands. Pope & Land Enterprises sold the 112,000-square-foot class A office building to REIT Management & Research.

David Meline, Stewart Calhoun, Samir Idris, and Casey Masters of Cushman & Wakefield’s Southeast Capital Markets Group represented Pope & Land. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Located at 101 W. Ponce de Leon Ave. in Downtown Decatur, the property is 100% leased through 2021 to The Emory Clinic Inc., a subsidiary of Emory Healthcare, Georgia’s largest healthcare provider. The deal also included an interest in 122 parking spaces located in the Artisan Parking Deck just west of the property.

“Some elements of Atlanta CRE are really active and other pockets are warming up a little more slowly,” Summey Orr, managing partner at Hartman Simmons, tells GlobeSt.com. “In general, we are seeing significantly more deal activity than we were a year ago, and more specifically, we are seeing a lot more positive activity—good deals for buyers and sellers or landlords and tenants, as opposed to distressed situations.”   

The East Atlanta-Decatur submarket continues to adjust to the economy, according to the e-Dorey Atlanta Office Field Report, with several properties recently changing hands. The report concludes that Decatur is doing better than the more eastern part of the submarket. The area has absorbed nearly 20,000 square feet in the first quarter and boasts a vacancy rate of 10.45%, according to CoStar Group.

Atlanta-wide, Orr says the office market has been slow to warm up, which is to be expected given the strong correlation between lower employment rates and reduced needs for office space. But he is noticing an emerging trend: creative re-use of existing spaces no one would have tried 10 years ago.

“We see office users going into retail centers, governments taking what was previously more commercial space, and recreational users in industrial spaces,” Orr says. “And while we tend to think of that as creativity, it’s really just the market going back to the fundamental concept that good real estate is good real estate.”