Rainier Cos. Acquires Boston Retail Assets for $83M

Colony Place. Image courtesy of Newmark Knight Frank

Rainier Cos. has acquired two major retail components of Colony Place mixed-use campus in Plymouth, Mass., totaling 418,970 square feet from Saxon Partners. The Plaza is a 230,497-square-foot power center and The Village is an 188,473-square-foot lifestyle center.

The sale price was not disclosed by the two companies, but a locally based news website, www.wickedlocal.com, reported the property sold for $83 million, according to Plymouth County Registry of Deeds records.

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Both components of Colony Place have category-leading retailers as tenants, offering Rainier the ability to leverage the center’s dominant position in the market to create additional value. Tenants at Colony Place include Walmart, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Bed, Bath & Beyond, Old Navy, Petco, Best Buy, Aldi food market, Michael’s, Olive Garden and Starbuck’s.

“We have developed an investment strategy around purchasing market dominant grocery-anchored power centers across the U.S. We have purchased approximately $600 million worth of similar assets in the last two and a half years and plan to continue the strategy,” Rainier President Danny Lovell told Commercial Property Executive. “We were not specifically targeting the Boston/Plymouth market. It was simply where a high-quality asset that fit our strategy became available.”

Colony Place. Image courtesy of Newmark Knight Frank

Saxon Partners, a Hingham, Mass.-based real estate investment, development and management company, will continue in the role of master developer of the Colony Place mixed-use campus. The firm is currently in the process of adding another hotel and a 320-unit multifamily community to the 1 million-square-foot development.  The campus already has a Hampton Inn & Suites.

Located midway between Boston and Cape Cod, Mass., the property is positioned along Route 44 just off Route 3, the primary north-south highway that connects them. Colony Place consistently dominates the retail activity for new leases and lease renewals, according to Geoffrey Millerd, vice chairman at Newmark Knight Frank, which represented the seller and procured the buyer for the transaction.

Millerd was part of NKF’s Boston Capital Markets group, which oversaw the transaction. Other members of the NKF team were Co-Head of U.S. Capital Markets Robert Griffin, Senior Managing Director Justin Smith and Director Paul Penman.

Rainier deals

Founded in 2003, Rainier targets value-add investing, preferred equity and mezzanine debt investments and third-party asset management. The firm manages more than $2 billion of investment assets with individual, corporate and institutional investment partners. At the same time Rainier announced the Colony Place acquisition, it also noted it had partnered with Herndon Properties, developer of Dawson Marketplace near Atlanta, and recapitalized the 366,700-square-foot super-regional shopping center. While they did not break down the amount of each investment, Rainier said the total for both transactions was $160 million. Financing for both deals was arranged by Sunny Sajnani with Dallas-based Metropolitan Capital Advisors.

In recent months, Rainier has also been selling assets. In November, the firm  sold Alico Business Center, a 48,000-square-foot mixed-use building with 8,000 square feet of retail in Fort Myers, Fla., to Friendly Village for $9 million. The deal closed two months after Rainier sold a 27-asset retail portfolio spread across eight Central U.S. states that included grocery, home improvement, auto parts and dollar stores, along with fitness centers, two U.S. Post Offices, a pharmacy and gas station.