Montgomery County retail center sells for $161 million

A Bethesda-based real estate firm and its partner have bought a 760,000-square-foot retail center in the Greater Philadelphia region for $161.75 million, the companies announced Friday.

Finmarc Management, Inc. partnered with New York-based investment and operating firm KPR Centers on the acquisition.

Providence Town Center, which is in Collegeville, a town northwest of Philadelphia, first opened in 2009 and features 11 anchor tenants, led by a Wegmans Food Markets. The center has 70 tenants, including retail, dining, medical and more. The center is on 82 acres of land at 100 Town Center.

“The new ownership team has plans for improvements to the center to drive a higher velocity of customer traffic to the already busy Town Center,” Finmarc Principal and Co-Founder David Fink said in a news release. “This strategy and preliminary activity have already garnered interest from additional national and regional tenants looking to establish a presence at Providence Town Center.”

The shopping center is well-positioned for future success, the companies said, with the surrounding communities having a growing population of just under 125,000. Nearby residential communities have expanded by more than 42% in the past two decades, and a 700-unit apartment project is planned.

The shopping center is also adjacent to Route 422, which almost 65,000 vehicles travel daily, and Route 29, which about 20,000 vehicles travel daily.

“Providence Town Center in an institutional-quality regional shopping center and, with more than a dozen high-performing anchor tenants including Wegmans Food Markets, is among the dominant retail venues in the greater Philadelphia trade area,” Fink said. “The surrounding demographics led by an ever-growing residential population, together with the presence of major employers and employment centers, provide us with tremendous confidence about the asset’s long-term performance.”

This follows another Philadelphia-area transition by the two companies; late last year, Finmarc and KPR sold Red Lion Plaza, a shopping center at 9950 Roosevelt Boulevard in Philadelphia for $56.45 million that had been owned by a joint venture of the two companies since 2013. The identity of the buyers was not disclosed.

The firm has also recently broken into the North Carolina market through the $58 million acquisition of a 383,000-square-foot retail center in Raleigh.