The Stop & Shop Plaza, near the I-91 and Route 190 interchange in Enfield, has a new owner who acknowledges his affinity for investing in Hartford area properties.
Daniel Katz and his eponymous Manhattan investment real estate company in late March paid Boston-based Centro Property Group $15.5 million for the 21-year-old shopping center anchored by the regional supermarket chain.
Built on 13.9 acres, the plaza at 54 Hazard Ave. is midway between Hartford and Springfield. The property is anchored by a 71,440-square-foot Stop & Shop.
The plaza, which underwent an exterior facelift in the fall of 2007, is 86 percent occupied. The remaining 51,000 square feet under roof is occupied by 99 Restaurant, Advance Auto Parts, UPS and H&R Block. There also is a new Stop & Shop gas station on the property.
Summit Realty Partners of Lexington, Mass., has been hired to manage the plaza.
Robert E. Griffin, Jr., Geoffrey Millerd, and Michael d’Hemecourt — all from Cushman & Wakefield Capital Markets Group — linked Centro to Katz Properties.
It is typical of many of the commercial real estate offers his company sees nowadays, Katz said.
“Lots of deals going on now are institutional-sized sellers who have pressure on their debt loads,’’ he said.
In fact, Katz says his company is more than eager to invest in convenience-oriented retail properties, such as ones like Stop & Shop Plaza that are anchored with a supermarket or drug store.
“I don’t want to call them recession-proof, but these are properties where people visit two or more times a week. Those are what we want,’’ he said.
Seven-year-old Katz Properties’ Connecticut portfolio also includes Hartford’s Gothic Park, a 60,000-square-foot medical office building at Woodland Street and Asylum Avenue, in the shadow of Saint Francis Hospital. Katz acquired it in 2007, along with rights for future development on the site.
His firm, Katz said, also at one time held the development rights to the West Hartford site on Farmington Avenue that is now the Stonebridge Estate luxury condos, developed by Karl Krapek and Tony Giorgio.
A New York native, Katz’s familiarity with Hartford area real estate stems from his days as a finance undergraduate at the University of Hartford. While a student in 1996, he interned with New Haven developer David Nyberg’s then fledgling firm.
While Nyberg has gone on to convert a number of Hartford and New Haven commercial buildings to residential, Katz has focused exclusively on buying or developing commercial properties.
Last July, Katz Properties paid $4 million for the fully-leased Warwick Plaza shopping center in Rhode Island.
“Our focus is on the corridor between New York and Boston,’’ Katz said. “We’re trying to grow our portfolio. We recognize a lot of people are sitting on the sidelines, for good reasons or bad.’’
He declined to specify the size of Katz Properties’ portfolio.
Connecticut lenders, too, are active in the real estate marketplace, Katz said. Banker Chris Arnold of Liberty Bank in Middletown financed Katz’s Enfield purchase, Katz said.
“We really like dealing with the people in Hartford,’’ Katz said.
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Greg Seay is Hartford Business Journal Web editor.
