Casas Adobes Plaza, the retail, restaurant and specialty shopping center on the southwest corner of West Ina and North Oracle roads, changed hands this week.
Casas Adobes Plaza LLC and Casas Adobes Ventures sold the 91,318-square-foot property — home to a Chipotle, Wildflower American Cuisine and a newly rebuilt Whole Foods Market, among more than 20 other tenants — for $46 million to Global Retail Investors of Bethesda, Maryland.
Global Retail Investors, or GRI, is a partnership of the Maryland-based First Washington Realty and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), the largest public pension fund in the United States.
The all-cash purchase worked out to about $504 per square foot.
Patrick Dempsey and Jan Fincham of Lee & Associates Arizona helped facilitate the deal.
Dempsey said GRI will continue to operate Casas Adobes as a retail space.
“The tenants define the property, and that is what attracted them to the investment,” Dempsey said.
GRI also owns the River Center, a 117,000-square-foot shopping center at East River and North Craycroft roads, which it purchased in January of 2014.
“Casas Adobes is an iconic Tucson shopping center,” Dempsey said. “The quality of the design and architecture, the busy traffic at the intersection — all these things bode well for the future of the property.”
Richard Shenkarow, the co-owner and general operating partner of Casas Adobes since 1997, said if it were up to only him, he wouldn’t have sold.
When Shenkarow and his partners bought the property, an example of Spanish and Mediterranean-influenced architecture in Tucson for more than six decades, it was in terrible shape, he said.
“It was ready to fall over,” he said. “There was an enormous amount of deferred maintenance with the electrical, water, sewage, the structures themselves.”
Shenkarow, who also owns the realty company Shenkarow Realty Advisors, put significant time, effort and money into improving the property.
His final major project was a complete rebuild of the Whole Foods Market, bringing the square footage of the store from 16,000 to 32,000 square feet when it reopened in August.
“Whole Foods was very patient,” Shenkarow said. “It is very rare for a grocer to go along with something like that.”
CalPERS had approached Shenkarow several times over the last few years to purchase Casas Adobes before it “finally made an offer that was very difficult not to take a serious look at,” Shenkarow said. “I had a fiduciary responsibility to bring it to an excellent group of partner-investors.”
Shenkarow considered Casas Adobes a labor of love. Seeing it go was difficult.
“Every single brick, every piece of adobe, had been taken down and put back into place,” he said. “It was a generational property. Given the option, I would have kept it and passed it down to my sons.”
