ATLANTA-The recent sale of nine acres at I-85 and Hamilton Mill Road in Gwinnett County Georgia for $3.2 million, or about $357,000 per acre, took two years to complete, says Darrell Chapman, president of the Georgia 400 office of Bull Realty in the Atlanta suburb of Dawsonville, who brokered the deal for the seller. That‘s partly because the buyer was the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority which has to go through an elaborate process to buy property, he says.
The GRTA, as the authority is known, is planning to build a Park & Ride lot at the site for 900 cars, for people who prefer to take the bus to work to driving on the Atlanta area’s crowded expressways. Buford, Georgia, the municipality where the GRTA site is located, is about 30 miles from downtown Atlanta.
The land, where most of the site work is already completed, was not supposed to be purchased by the GRTA for its Park & Ride facility, says Chapman. The nine acres, which is part of a 20-acre parcel, was originally supposed to have just retail on it, with a Wal-Mart Super Center, which is up and running, as the anchor. The owners of the site, Hamilton Mill, LLC, a local investment group, could have sold the land for a lot more before the recession, says Chapman. Two or three years ago, one-acre lots in the vicinity were selling for $650,000, he says.
Cliff Sandoz, a local developer and a principal with the investor group which sold the GRTA property, wants to sell the rest of the land, 11 acres, plus four additional acres down the street, to a shopping center developer and, in fact, there is a conceptual plan for an 120,000-square-foot center, says Chapman.
It makes sense to build there, says Chapman, especially with a new Park & Ride lot to lure people into stores and restaurants on their way to and from work. The area is affluent, he says, with an average household income of $125,000 within a three-mile radius, and Park & Rides have been successful in other areas of the Atlanta metro, he says, which means there would be plenty of commuters to appeal to.
Shopping centers developers and a developer of a 10,000-square foot gym have showed interest in the property, says Chapman. There are lots of retailers and some office condos in the area already, he says. “If the recession hadn’t happened, the owners (of the land) would have already sold it to be a retail developer, not the GRTA,” he says.
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