GlobeSt.com EXCLUSIVE: Lightstone Picks Up North Dakota Center for $55M

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MINOT, ND-The 600,000-sf Dakota Square Mall here has changed hands for $55.1 million. The Lightstone Group of Lakewood, NJ acquired the well-leased asset from BRE Concordia LLC, a joint venture of Polaris Capital and an affiliate of Blackstone Real Estate Group. The transaction closed earlier this week.Dakota Square Mall is located on Highway 83, about 110 miles north of Bismarck and 50 miles south of Canada. The 79-acre mall is anchored by Target, Sears, JCPenney, a 138-room Sleep Inn hotel and a 24,000-sf indoor water park. The mall is home to about 85 retailers. Vacancy is about 5% and sales are reportedly about $320 per sf, putting it among the top 5% of malls nationally. Its neighbor is a 10,000-sf convention center.Lightstone Group chairman and principal David Lichtenstein tells GlobeSt.com that the mall is the only one within an 80-mile radius, making it the social and economic center of the region—a position Lightstone relishes. “We like to be somebody important in the community,” he says. “We’d rather be the No. 1 mall in a tertiary community than an owner of the third or fourth mall in a larger community.”Lightstone chief investment officer Angela Mirizzi-Olsen tells GlobeSt.com that the acquisition includes 540,000 sf since Target does not lease its space. However, Olsen says the acquisition also includes room to add at least three additional big-box stores, one of which will be a 20,000-sf Best Buy.The privately held real estate firm Granite Partners LLC of New York handled the disposition. Acquisition financing was provided by Wachovia and arranged by Wachovia managing director Chad Johnson. The property will be managed by Prime Retail, which Lichtenstein owns along with Lightstone. Lightstone is one of the 25 largest residential and commercial owners and operators of real estate in the US today. The company owns 16,000 residential units and 26 million sf of office, industrial and retail properties in 25 states and Puerto Rico.Blackstone and Polaris also sold this week a 1.3 million-sf super-regional center in Cincinnati for $180 million. The buyer was Thor Equities of New York City. (For that story, click here.)