Forty-Four Thousand Feet Of Retail Cleared $653 A Foot

CenterSquare Investment Management of Conshohocken, Pennsylvania acquired the Hub at Bexley from Center Connect Development of Tampa, the property's ground-up developer. The asset is 44,000 square feet of grocery and service retail in Land O' Lakes, Florida, roughly 22 miles north of downtown Tampa. The price was $28.75 million. JLL brokered the transaction; the side represented was not specified, and no financing terms were disclosed.

Because this is a first-generation developer exit, no prior-owner resale basis exists.

The math. $653.41 per square foot. Against CRE360's September 8 retail marks, that is 4.13x the $158.17 per square foot paid for Cross Country Plaza in Columbus, Georgia, and 15.10x the $43.27 per square foot paid for Uptown McComb in Mississippi. All three trades cleared within five days of one another.

Six hundred fifty-three dollars a foot for retail is not a shopping-center number. It is a number that only appears when the buyer is underwriting income per square foot, not real estate per square foot — small-format, newly built, service-and-grocery tenancy, no anchor drag, no functional obsolescence, no deferred capital expenditure.

The spread against McComb is the sharpest comparative CRE360 has recorded in a single week. Both are retail. Both are U.S. Sun Belt. One is 342,000 square feet of 1987-vintage big-box in a tertiary Mississippi market; the other is 44,000 feet of new construction in a growth suburb of Tampa. The asset class label does the buyer no favors.

A first-generation developer exit removes the usual analytical handle — there is no prior basis to measure against, so the price carries no information about appreciation. What it carries is a merchant-build clearing level for new small-format retail in a Florida growth corridor.

Implications. Retail as a category tells an underwriter almost nothing. Format, vintage, tenancy and market do all the work, and the dispersion inside the category is now wider than the dispersion between categories. Merchant builders of small-format retail in Sun Belt growth corridors have a live institutional bid. Owners of large-format tertiary retail are transacting in an entirely different market that happens to share a name.

Uncertainty. Effectively single-sourced. Commercial Real Estate Direct republished Tampa Bay Business Journal reporting; the originating article is subscription-gated and could not be independently pulled, and CRE Direct has shown date drift on prior runs. No tenant roster, anchor identity, cap rate, occupancy or year built was disclosed, and the grocery and service characterization comes from secondary reporting. The 4.13x and 15.10x comparisons are CRE360 derivations across three separately reported transactions, not a matched-pair analysis.