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.