Report: Palmer Plaza under contract to sell to Chicago investors

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Alex Palmer

Adam Sichko

Senior Reporter- Nashville Business Journal

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A newly formed investment group from Chicago is under contract to pay about $50 million for Palmer Plaza, the namesake office tower of Nashville developer Alex Palmer.

That's according to a report by Commercial Real Estate Direct, which is a 15-year-old online industry news outlet.

The reported price tag is, as we've noted, the expected price that Palmer's 18-story building in Midtown would fetch.

Commercial Real Estate Direct reports that the prospective buyer is Vanderbilt Partners LLC, based in Chicago. Illinois state records show the business was created six months ago by Casey R. Wold. Previously, Wold spent almost a decade as a senior managing director at Tishman Speyer, a global real estate company whose portfolio includes, among other buildings, New York City's iconic Rockefeller Center and Chrysler Building.

Attempts to reach Wold were not successful.

The 28-year-old Palmer Plaza has 243,000 square feet of top-grade Class A office space. All but 4 percent is occupied, yet another indicator of the strength of Nashville's real estate industry at the moment.

There are 700 underground parking spaces, plus a garage behind the building.

By square footage, Alex S. Palmer & Co. is among the larger tenants. Others include Bethel University, the health IT business Informatics Corporation of America, insurance broker Marsh Inc. and government agencies.

The entity Palmer Plaza Partners II owes a balance of $29.2 million on a loan tied to the building, according to data supplied by Trepp, a global commercial real estate analytics firm. The loan comes due in September 2015.

I've reached out to representatives of Palmer for comment. Check back with this story for any further updates.

Adam covers commercial real estate and manufacturing.