Kennedy Wilson, Shimizu test office-to-apartment trade in Atlanta

Their first partnership, IREI reports, is a $139 million bet that a former UPS office site in Sandy Springs, Ga., can be converted into apartments. Kennedy Wilson bought the 6.9 acres at 35 Glenlake Parkway NE in late 2025, began demolition this summer, and expects the first residents in 2028 at Caldwell, a 382-unit luxury multifamily community.

The five-story project pairs residences averaging 937 square feet with more than 17,500 square feet of indoor and outdoor amenities, near Atlanta's major employment centers, retail destinations, and transportation corridors; it is Kennedy Wilson's first multifamily development in Georgia.

The venture arrives as Kennedy Wilson builds out its investment management platform, a capital formation push that brought former Jamison CEO Jaime Lee aboard last month, as this publication reported; his mandate is to raise capital for a platform sized at $37 billion when the hiring was announced. The Shimizu partnership is an early test of how that capital-raising effort will be deployed, giving the Japanese firm a channel into U.S. apartment development through an established operator in a Sun Belt market facing limited new multifamily supply; for Kennedy Wilson, it places the development group in a new market alongside a financial partner with long horizons.

The deal is structured as a partnership rather than a loan or preferred-equity ticket, so Shimizu's exposure follows the development's execution as much as its stabilized yield. John McCullough, president of Kennedy Wilson's multifamily development group, describes the site as sitting in a submarket with strong employment growth, an affluent resident base, and limited new multifamily supply—the fundamentals that make an office conversion worth the wait.

That means an underused office site repriced as multifamily dirt, with demolition already underway. The test is whether the trade still holds in 2028, when Caldwell hits a leasing market that will have seen several more years of Atlanta apartment deliveries; by then, the project will be competing with supply already in the pipeline, a different market from the one Kennedy Wilson bought into in late 2025. For Shimizu, the payoff will be a measure of whether its first U.S. development partnership becomes a platform or stays a one-off.