Tourmaline buys Lacey retail at a lease-up price

Connect CRE reported that Newmark arranged the $44.1 million sale of South Sound Center, a 384,153-square-foot grocery-anchored retail property at 711 SE Sleater Kinney Road in Lacey, Washington, with Billy Sleeth, a Newmark executive managing director, representing the seller, Capital Development Company, which developed the center and has owned and operated it for about six decades. Tourmaline Capital was the buyer.

Connect CRE describes the center as a dominant retail hub for Lacey and the greater South Sound, set on a corridor between two Interstate 5 interchanges. Trader Joe's signed a new 10-year lease and opened in November 2025, joining Marshalls, PetSmart and Michaels with Target as a shadow anchor; at 81% occupied when it sold, the property leaves Tourmaline a defined path to add value through lease-up, operational changes and capital improvements.

A six-decade hold is unusual in any property type, and the decision to sell once Trader Joe's lease was in place suggests a seller that preferred monetizing a settled anchor roster to carrying lease-up risk itself. The seller is leaving that upside to the buyer; the vacancy is now Tourmaline's problem and Tourmaline's return.

At $44.1 million, the price works out to roughly $115 a square foot—a lease-up number built on filling the remaining 19%, not the income currently in place. A 10-year Trader Joe's commitment gives the leasing story a floor and Target's shadow-anchor presence gives it pull, but the buyer's return turns on converting vacancy into rent; the price assumes that work gets done, which makes this a business-plan trade rather than a stabilized-asset trade.

The trade fits a pattern through the summer: tenant interest is leading the recovery, and capital is arriving after leases. South Sound Center is one more expression of that sequence—a national grocer signs, and a buyer steps in to underwrite the space around it—and the next comps for Lacey's retail market will be set by how quickly Tourmaline turns that vacancy into leased square feet.

Newmark's August has included work on both sides of the capital stack; the firm also placed a $277 million construction loan on a Jersey City tower, as this publication reported, and the Lacey sale gives the brokerage a retail comp to go with that debt deal.