BOMA Names Peachtree Center Top Office Building

ATLANTA-Colonnades Properties of New York has placed a new prize on its trophy wall–best office building in Atlanta in the one-million-sf-plus category. The company’s 37-year-old, six-building, 2.6-million-sf Peachtree Center at 229 Peachtree St., Downtown, won the annual TOBY Award presented by the Atlanta chapter of the Building Owners and Managers Association. TOBY stands for the Office Building of the Year. The award was based on tenant relations, community impact, emergency preparedness and security standards, energy management systems and procedures, training of building personnel, building accessibility, owner’s goals and objectives and physical attributes.Vicki Irby, general manager of Colonnades Properties, calls the property “one of Atlanta’s real estate jewels.” Colonnades plans to build a 10-story, 500,000-sf addition to the $245-million Peachtree Center when it signs a tenant or tenants to leases totaling at least 50% of the rentable sf, Downtown brokers familiar with the company’s goals tell GlobeSt.com.Peachtree Center contains a three-tiered mall with 70 shops and a 73,500-sf athletic club. The asset was designed by Atlanta architect John Portman Jr. and built in phases from 1967 to 1988.Colonnades was formerly known as the Taylor Simpson Group founded in 1979 by Paul Taylor Jr. Taylor Simpson became Colonnades in early 2000 after Taylor Simpson merged with Northco Management Services.Taylor Simpson had purchased the four-block Peachtree Center from two different owners–NLI Properties Inc., the real estate division of Nippon Life Insurance Co., and the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States. The $245-million purchase price in fall 1998 equates to $96 per sf, a bargain today, local area brokers tell GlobeSt.com. “Comparable class A mega properties, such as Peachtree Center, would go for at least $200-plus per sf today,” an office broker who has worked the Downtown market for 15 years tells GlobeSt.com.Colonnades owns 30 office properties encompassing 11 million sf valued at $2 billion. The firm also owns 1,000 hotel rooms, 1,000 apartment units and 600 acres of development land in multiple markets from Miami to Minneapolis, according to its website.