Orion Real Estate Group pays $26.1M for Food Lion-anchored Boone shopping center

Orion Real Estate Group paid $26.1 million for Watauga Village, an 88,800-square-foot Food Lion-anchored neighborhood center at 276 Watauga Village Drive in Boone, North Carolina; CBRE National Retail Partners’ Adam Russ, Erin Varol and Will Register represented the seller, according to Connect CRE.

Fully leased, the rent roll skews toward repeat visits—Michaels, Mercy Urgent Care, Spectrum, Tropical Smoothie Café and Wingstop alongside the grocery anchor—and the property sits in Boone, the commercial center of North Carolina’s High Country and home to Appalachian State University’s roughly 21,800 students. It is also shadow-anchored by a Walmart Supercenter and next to Watauga Medical Center, the region’s primary hospital, so the university, the Walmart, and the hospital all sit outside the rent roll entirely.

At $26.1 million for 88,800 square feet, the price works out to roughly $294 a square foot, though the coverage discloses no capitalization rate, leaving the yield Orion underwrote invisible from the outside.

The purchase changes Orion’s property mix as much as its map. The firm already owns or manages 23 other properties in North Carolina totaling 101,583 square feet, every one of them single-tenant triple-net assets, and Watauga Village alone equals about 87% of that square footage—one center close to the size of a portfolio assembled a building at a time. The deal is Orion’s first shopping center acquisition in the state, and none of the existing properties demanded the leasing and management work a multi-tenant anchor property does.

Retail’s scarcity premium has split, as this publication has argued, with grocery anchors and drive-through boxes setting the price while everything else reprices tenant by tenant. Watauga Village lands on the strong side of that divide, with a Food Lion lease, a Walmart shadow anchor, a hospital next door, full occupancy at closing, and a university town supplying the demand behind the service tenants.

Whether Orion is reweighting toward multi-tenant retail in the Carolinas or merely sampling it remains unstated in the coverage. For the wider market, the deal is a clean late-September comp—a grocery-anchored center in a university market at just under $294 a square foot—and the tell will be whether another multi-tenant purchase follows within that 23-property footprint or the firm stays single-tenant.