Casas Adobes Plaza is located at the intersection of Oracle Road and Ina Road in Tucson. Image courtesy of JLL
First Washington Realty Co. has sold Casas Adobes Plaza, a 92,330-square-foot shopping center in Tucson, Arizona, for $51 million.
A company linked to Litwin Management acquired the property with a $25.5 million loan from Nationwide, according to public records. JLL represented the seller in securing the financing.
Casas Adobes Plaza, located on 9.5 acres, opened in 1953 and was renovated in 2014. It was 97% leased at the time of the sale, with anchor tenants including Whole Foods, Starbucks, Pei Wei, Talbots, and Chico’s.
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Casas Adobes Plaza is located at 7001-7139 North Oracle Road, at the intersection of Oracle and Ina Roads. The shopping center serves two of Tucson’s most affluent residential communities, Catalina Foothills and Oro Valley. According to JLL, the median household income within a one-mile radius of this trade area exceeds $122,240.
Managing Directors Patrick Dempsey and Geoff Tranchina led the JLL Capital Markets investment advisory team, while Senior Managing Director Greg Brown and Senior Director Jason Carlos led the debt advisory team. Analyst Quin Madden supported both groups.
Fertile Desert
According to Cushman & Wakefield’s second-quarter report, the Tucson area is seeing slow population and employment growth, while the unemployment rate has fallen to 3.4 percent.
The metropolitan area retail market has held steady with a vacancy rate of 5.7% and absorption of 52,500 square feet over the past 12 months, with some space being repurposed this year, including the conversion of two Walgreens stores to Dollar Tree stores.
Last January, First Washington Realty sold River Center, a 107,508-square-foot Class A retail center in Tucson that also houses a Whole Foods, to a private investor for $31.1 million.