Rare Infill Retail in Old Town Trades

ALEXANDRIA, VA—An infill retail building in Old Town Alexandria has traded for $2.3 million or $320 per square foot. The new owner of the Montgomery Building, located at 600 Montgomery St., will be opening an Italian restaurant in the building. As it happened, the space was formerly occupied by another restaurant, Ristorante Villa D'Este.

The seller, Rose Asner, LLC, was represented by Greysteel Company's Mid-Atlantic retail investment sales team of Gil Neuman and Henry Schuldinger.

"This trade is another substantiation of the demand for urban infill in the DC area suburbs," Neuman tells GlobeSt.com. "Whether these buildings are occupied by credit or non-credit tenants, or even vacant, there is high demand for them and the pricing is very competitive."

For example, the Montgomery Building is vacant, making the $320 per square foot price point especially competitive. "If it had been occupied and cash-flowing it would have gone for substantially higher," Neuman says.

Also, properties in Old Town rarely come to market. In this case, the seller was a family-owned entity whose patriarch has passed away. The children decided to sell the property, Neuman says. The buyer is a regional restaurateur. The building attracted multiple offers from investors who typically look to acquire similar properties in Downtown DC, according to Schuldinger "but recognized an opportunity to invest in a strong sub-market in Virginia with long-term growth potential."

The building is situated at a traffic light on the corner of N. Saint Asaph Street in the North Old Town neighborhood of the City of Alexandria. Projects underway in the immediate area include a planned city-block residential and retail mixed-used project by Edens, the recently delivered Kingsley 175-unit luxury apartment building over a new Harris Teeter grocery store, the Oronoco, a 60-unit luxury waterfront condo building, The Belle Pre, a 360-unit luxury apartment building with ground floor retail and Old Town Commons, a development that 155 townhomes and 76 condominiums spread over a five-block area.