Raleigh-Area Wegmans Property Sells for $35M

Wegmans, West Cary. Image courtesy of JLL

Realty Income Corp. has acquired Wegmans, West Cary, a 103,000-square-foot, single-tenant retail property in Cary, N.C. JLL Capital Markets marketed the property on behalf of the seller, Leyland Twin Lakes LLC, an affiliate of LeylandAlliance.

The retail property, which sold for $34.8 million, anchors Twin Lakes Center, a walkable, 35-acre mixed-use project developed by Leyland. Besides the Wegmans, the Twin Lakes Center includes 25,000 square feet of retail and medical office space, as well as approximately 400 multifamily units under development.

READ ALSO: Retail Crisis Hits Small Shops the Hardest

The asset was completed earlier this year and is the second Wegmans store to open in the Carolinas. A family-owned regional supermarket chain, Wegmans is based in Rochester, N.Y., and operates 102 stores from New England to the Mid-Atlantic.

Wegmans, West Cary is located at 3710 Davis Drive, in one of the most affluent zip codes in the Raleigh-Durham MSA. Cary is also the second fastest-growing town in North Carolina.

The JLL Retail Capital Markets team representing Leyland was led by Senior Director Tom Kolarczyk, Director Ryan Eklund and Senior Managing Director Chris Angelone.

“The Twin Lakes development is an exceptionally well-conceived, Class A development,” Kolarczyk said in a prepared statement. “The sale of the Wegmans ground lease showcased the high demand for core, credit and long-term triple-net-leased assets.”

Quite the appetite

In its pursuit of single-tenant retail properties, Realty Income Corp. seems to take both smaller bites of that asset class and very large ones. Just a year ago, the company bought from CIM Group a retail portfolio of more than 450 properties, totaling about 5.1 million square feet and spread across 41 states, for $1.3 billion. At the time of sale, Dollar General was the most prominent tenant, occupying 145 properties and bringing in nearly 16 percent of the portfolio’s total rental income.

During a webinar earlier this year—but already well into the pandemic—D.J. Busch, managing director and head of retail research at Green Street Advisors, commented on the company’s appetite for grocery-anchored retail centers. According to Busch, these properties are bolstering strip center fundamentals overall, with resilience that’s hard to match elsewhere in the retail asset class currently.