JLL closes Bedminster grocery-anchored center sale to Asana Partners at undisclosed price

JLL Capital Markets closed the sale of The Hills Village Center, a 110,000-square-foot grocery-anchored property at 550 Hills Drive in Bedminster, N.J., to Asana Partners. Senior managing directors Jose Cruz and Kevin O'Hearn, senior director J.B. Bruno and senior associate Cole Doyon represented the seller, Lena Centers, which the announcement describes as a subsidiary of Longpoint Partners. The price was not disclosed.

The center is fully leased, anchored by Kings Food Markets and CVS and occupied by Starbucks, PNC Bank, Peapack Gladstone Bank and a mix of dining and service retailers. Cruz called it the commercial hub for The Hills community and the surrounding areas, and traced the sale to both the quality of the asset and the strength of the Somerset County retail market, where strong demographics and limited competition continue to draw investors. That is the sell-side case grocery-anchored owners have been making all year, and the roster is the argument in lease form: scarce new supply, steady traffic, and income that runs as long as the anchors stay.

The trade leaves no number behind. The same absence appeared in the Sept. 24 sale of a newly built, unanchored strip in North County, where the undisclosed price kept the format's clearing level private. Here the silence covers the other end of the market—the grocery-anchored end where the scarcity premium sits. Without a price there is no cap rate, no per-square-foot basis, and no way to set a Bedminster center against the debt terms its peers have been borrowing on.

Last month a regional bank's 78.4% loan-to-price on a White Plains grocery center read as evidence that retail debt has not vanished so much as sorted itself by tenant roster, with full rent rolls still borrowing on ordinary terms. Hills Village would pass that test. Whether the equity buyer paid on the same logic is what a disclosed price would have shown.

Asana Partners comes to the asset with scale: $8.4 billion in registered AUM and 125 employees make a 110,000-square-foot center a small line for the buyer, suggesting the appeal is the format and the submarket more than the size of the check. On the other side of the trade, the seller of record is a subsidiary of Longpoint Partners rather than the parent, and the coverage does not say when the sale closed, how the property came to market, or what the seller paid for it.

What Asana paid stays with the parties. The next Somerset County grocery-anchored sale will show whether a number comes back.