The 110,000-square-foot Hills Village Shopping Center, near the U.S. Route 202 and Interstate 287 exchange in Bedminster, was recently sold for $60.7 million. The retail center, which is anchored by Kings Food Markets and a CVS, was acquired by a subsidiary of Charlotte, North Carolina-based Asana Partners.
MyCentralJersey.com first reported the sale of the property at 550 Hills Drive. The sale comes less than two years after the seller, a subsidiary of Boston-based Longpoint, bought the shopping center from Chicago-based BIT Holdings 51 for $45 million.
A report in NJBIZ says Starbucks, Peapack Gladstone Bank, and Purity Water occupy the Hills Village Shopping Center. Marketing materials from Longpoint and brokerage firm JLL show the strip mall also includes several food and service tenants, including Pancheros Mexican Grill, CB Pet Market, Cold Stone Creamery, and Village Cleaners, to name a few.
A listing from JLL on LoopNet.com states that the shopping center sits on a 12.74-acre lot with 512 parking spaces in a heavily trafficked, affluent area of Somerset County. The average household income within five miles of the strip mall is $230,910, and the median home value is $711,180. The shopping center is also across the street from the 194,000-square-foot Offices at Bedminster and the 40,000-square-foot Bedminster Medical Plaza.
While the marketing materials also note that over 19,000 cars travel U.S. Route 202 every day, the shopping center is also near the I-78 and I-287 interchange, which links two of the state’s busiest roadways.
JLL and Longpoint say 175,025 daytime employees live within a 15-minute drive of the shopping center, while the population exceeds 127,000.
Asana Partners’ acquisition comes three months after The Real Deal reported that the investment firm and Norway-based Norges Bank Investment Management, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund by assets under management, launched a $500 million fund focused on acquiring grocery-anchored retail centers in the U.S. That report came one month after Norges and a consortium that included Canadian pension managers PSP Investments and La Caisse acquired Echo Realty, which owns over 231 retail centers primarily in the Midwest and Southeast. The investment groups acquired Echo Realty at a roughly $2 billion valuation.
