Forty-four thousand feet of retail space has been cleared, resulting in a net gain of $653 per 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.