Three Hundred Forty-Two Thousand Feet At Forty-Three A Foot

$43.27/sf — 27.4% of the $158.17/sf paid for Cross Country Plaza the same week. A 3.66x per-foot gap between two Deep South power centers with overlapping national tenancy. 328,320 sf occupied in a 39-year-old asset carrying two renovations inside the last three years.

Same week. Same region. Comparable national tenant rosters — Hobby Lobby and Ross here, T.J. Maxx and Burlington there. Both above 95% leased. One traded at $158 a foot; the other at $43.

Nothing about the rent rolls explains a 3.66x gap. What explains it is the exit. A 342,000 sf box in a Pike County town of roughly 12,000 has one realistic buyer profile, and everyone underwriting it knows that on day one. Illiquidity is not a discount applied at closing. It is priced into every year of the hold.

Note also what $43 a foot means against construction. Replacement cost on a modern power center runs multiples of that. This asset trades below the cost of the improvements standing on it — which is the definition of a market where the land contributes nothing and the building is worth only what its leases pay.

Implications. Tenant credit does not travel. The same Ross lease is worth several times more in a metro than in a tertiary market, because the value is not in the covenant — it is in the number of buyers who will underwrite that covenant in that location. Depth of the exit market, not quality of the rent roll, is what sets retail pricing today.

Uncertainty: RockStep acquired the center in 2017, but the price is not established. Pike County deed records would close that gap. Absent that basis, read this as capital recycling by a tertiary-market specialist, not distress.