PGIM Sells Grocery-Anchored Portfolio for $224M

The retail space space commands 608,314 square feet.

PGIM Real Estate has sold a grocery shopping portfolio for $223.85 million, scattered across multiple Florida markets to an undisclosed buyer.

They are located in Royal Palm Beach, Davie, Kissimmee, Lake Worth, and Fort Myers. In total, the portfolio hosts seven properties, spanning 608,314 square feet of retail space. Occupancy stood at 97 percent, across the entire portfolio.

JLL represented PGIM on the sale to help secure the purchaser. It’s unclear what specific grocery stores and/or shopping centers PGIM has sold.

“We are excited to have advised PGIM Real Estate on the sale of this well-curated compilation of highly desirable grocery-anchored shopping centers,” Danny Finkle, senior managing director of JLL’s capital markets team, said in a statement.

In Florida, available space is continuing to get harder to find in certain regions. Asking rents in the Southern part of the state have shot up by nearly five percent, while vacancy sat at just 2.8 percent in the first quarter, according to CoStar data. Plus, net absorption has outpaced deliveries for each of the past three years, according to a report from Lee & Associates. Miami-Dade County is standing out with its first quarter 2.7 percent vacancy rate – the lowest it has seen in a decade and down 30 basis points from the previous three months.

In addition to retail, PGIM focuses on other major CRE asset classes including office, senior housing, apartments, and industrial. It also has a big global presence, with over 1,400 properties worldwide, according to the real estate firm.

In the spring, PGIM made multiple moves on the offense. First, in April, it announced a $600 million joint venture with digital infrastructure giant, Equinix, Inc., to develop what the two claim to be the first xScale data center in the U.S. The two-story facility will be located in Silicon Valley, California.

Then, a month later overseas, the unit of Prudential Financial acquired a student housing portfolio in the U.K. It includes six portfolios, with nearly 3,000 beds. The purchase price was not revealed by PGIM.