A buyer new to Colorado and planning to expand its presence paid $12.5 million for a Kohl’s-anchored building on the Harmony Road corridor in Fort Collins.
Hartland, Wisconsin-based Investors Associated LLP was selected from a pool of buyers to acquire the 115,862-squarefoot building at 813-831 E. Harmony Road. Kohl’s occupies approximately 100,000 sf of the building. Guitar Center is the other tenant.
“We really like the Colorado market, and this is our first attempt at getting into it,” said Jamie Stefan, vice president of investor relations and operations. “We have a very diversified portfolio, not only by type and industry, but also by geographic region,” she said, noting Fort Collins is a market in which the company would like to “build a hub” of both commercial and residential properties that it could operate in tandem.
“The Fort Collins market was attractive to a lot of groups, being a growing market,” said Ben Synder of Matthews Real Estate Investment Services in Cleveland, who represented seller Kimco Ft. Collins 367 LLC with Kyle Matthews in the firm’s Los Angeles headquarters.
“We ran a pretty robust marketing process. We had over a dozen offers,” said Matthews. “It was a nice blend of active local buyers as well as coastal 1031 exchange buyers who were looking to go into Colorado markets.
“You have markets in Colorado that are high growth and doing very well, and local economies and assets that are doing very well, but the yields are still slightly higher and more attractive to buyers than what currently exists on either coast,” he said.
“We were able to interview all the buyers and pick the one that was the right combination of terms and probability of closing, and the choice in the buyer turned out to be a good one. They performed very well, and escrow was able to close on time and as expected.”
The building at 813-831 E. Harmony was built in 1990. Both Kohl’s, which has been at the property for more than 18 years, and Guitar Center have approximately 10 years remaining on their leases.
According to Stefan, Investors Associated prefers to invest in growing markets outside major metropolitan areas. “We find there is a great opportunity to get in and be part of that growing community.”
The company also likes to invest in both commercial and residential to create “live-work-play” environments. It is developing The Park at High Crossing, a mixed-use community next to a corporate office park it owns in growing East Madison, Wisconsin, and also working on a second development in Mississippi that combines residential and commercial opportunities.
