Atlanta Data Center Building Sells for $94 Million

Carter Validus Mission Critical REIT has agreed to acquire 338,000 square feet of space at 180 Peachtree in downtown Atlanta, including a major data center operated by colocation provider Equinix. In an SEC filing, Carter Validus said it would pay $94 million for the upper stories of the building, plus the parking garage. The space is 100 percent leased to six tenants.

One of them is Equinix (EQIX), which acquired the downtown Atlanta data center as part of its 2010 acquisition of Switch and Data. Equinix cited Atlanta as one of the markets where it could benefit from undeveloped space in the Switch & Data data center portfolio. Level 3 also operates data center space in the building.

180 Peachtree is an 8-story, 658,000 square foot building built in 1927. The building was bought in 2000 by Taconic Investment Partners, which invested $24 million to adapt the facility’s upper floors for telecom and data centers use. Taconic sold the building in March 2007 to Peachtree Carnegie LLC, which then leased the former Macy’s space on the lower three floors to 180 Peachtree Retail Group, a partnership of Atlanta investors.

Carter Validus is based in Tampa and headed by John Carter, a veteran real estate investor and principal of Carter & Associates. Data centers are part of a broader strategy in which Carter Validus hopes to take advantage of opportunities created by health care reform and its pending impact on medical real estate and IT infrastructure.

In May, the company acquired its first property, a fully-leased 20,000 square foot data center in Richardson, Texas.