A team comprising LV Collective and Kayne Anderson Real Estate has closed on a refinancing of a student housing venture near the Georgia Tech Campus. The project, called Rambler Atlanta, is a 798-bed student housing community in midtown Atlanta.

Canyon Partners Real Estate provided the senior loan in a deal arranged by TSB Capital Advisors.

Commercial Edge reports that previous financing for the 215-unit property includes a $95.3 million construction loan from Pacific Life Insurance Co.

Completed in 2025, the 19-story property is at 736 Peachtree St. NE, close to the university and Technology Square. The unit mix comprises studio, one-, two-, four-, five- and six-bedroom floorplans ranging from 388 to 1,909 square feet, along with almost 3,000 square feet of retail space. 

All apartments have private balconies or patios. Common-area amenities include a café, swimming pool, hot tub, fitness center, yoga room and sauna. The property also has resident lounges, coworking and study spaces.

Transwestern Real Estate Services (TRS) announced that St. Croix Hospice has signed a new, long-term lease at Mendota Tech – Workplace 3, located at 1175 Center Pointe Circle in Mendota Heights, Minnesota.

The care provider will occupy the full 30,586-square-foot suburban office building. Transwestern Principal Mike Honsa and Senior Vice President Eric Rapp represented owner Capital Partners in lease negotiations. St. Croix Hospice was represented by Tim Olsen of Carlson Partners.

“We’re excited to welcome St. Croix Hospice to the office campus,” said Honsa. “It is a great development for Mendota Heights as St. Croix brings its existing workforce to the city.” St. Croix Hospice, which is relocating from Oakdale, plans to occupy the building in the first quarter of 2025.

1175 Center Point Circle is in the 8-building Mendota Tech Office Park in Mendota Heights. The campus offers amenities such as outdoor patios and green space, ample free parking, and access to the Big Rivers Regional Trail along the Mississippi River.

Landmark Properties has purchased the parking lot of an Atlanta landmark. The family behind The Varsity restaurant agreed to sell 2 acres of its property along the Downtown Connector. A price was not disclosed.

Landmark is planning a 2,000-bed student housing project that would overlook Georgia Tech’s Bobby Dodd Stadium.

The Atlanta Business Chronicle reports the proposed development would not impact the operations of The Varsity. Landmark Properties said its new tower will offer pedestrian access into the heart of the Georgia Tech campus. 

Georgia Tech’s enrollment continues to grow, increasing almost 10% over the past three years. In fall 2023, enrollment for all degrees was almost 48,000 students, up from just under 44,000 students in fall 2021..

Landmark’s new project will offer amenities, such as a pool with jumbotrons, sports simulator, sauna, study space and sky lounges.

It will be its fourth project in Midtown and Downtown, bringing the company’s intown portfolio to more than 4,000 beds. 

Israeli tech firm WalkMe Inc. is moving its U.S. headquarters to Kilroy Realty’s 350 Mission St. as it prepares to be acquired by software giant SAP, reported the San Francisco Business Journal. The digital adoption software provider, whose tools help guide users and employees through apps, signed on to sublease close to 18,000 square feet on the 26th floor of 350 Mission St. from Salesforce, sources told the Business Journal. WalkMe previously leased roughly 40,000 square feet at 71 Stevenson St.

The company’s lease at 71 Stevenson was set to expire in July. Although WalkMe is expected to take occupancy at 350 Mission this fall, it already lists 350 Mission as its headquarters on its website. It’s the latest to sublease Salesforce space at the 455,350-square-foot office property, which Salesforce once occupied in its entirety.

Cushman & Wakefield’s Sam Wasserstein, JD Lumpkin and Danny Pickard are listing Salesforce’s space at 350 Mission. JLL’s Mike Sample represented WalkMe in the deal.

Student housing behemoth Core Spaces is hoping to build a 265-unit student housing project adjacent to the Academy of Medicine in midtown Atlanta. The Atlanta Business Chronicle reports Core is looking at a 0.8-acre site at Seventh and Cypress streets for the Hub Cypress, which is now used as a parking lot. The project would also include a coffee shop and be near Georgia Tech University. Dwell Design Studio is the architect.

Core Spaces would not impact the historic structure, which was built in 1941. The project would offer parking spaces and service-related features for the Academy of Medicine, which is now used as an event space.

The company recently completed The Hub on Campus in the same area, which consists of 290 units. Core Spaces has developed dozens of student housing projects across the United States. Yesterday, ConnectCRE reported on a 2,195-bed project near North Carolina State.

Pope & Land Real Estate has acquired 100 Midtown, a 118-unit, 330-bed luxury student housing community in Atlanta for $36.8 million.

TSB Realty brokered the deal, while TSB Capital Advisors arranged the acquisition financing which was provided by First Carolina Bank, a 5-year, $29.4 million loan.

Commercial Edge reports the asset changed hands in January 2021, when Arizona State Retirement System purchased it from Pierce Education Properties as part of a portfolio transaction.

Currently 98 percent occupied, the community came online in 1968 and was repositioned as a student housing property in 2004. The nine-story building consists of fully furnished two- and four-bedroom floorplans, ranging from 620 to 1,765 square feet. Located at 100 10th St. NW, the building is adjacent to the Georgia Institute of Technology main campus.

Common-area amenities at the almost 2-acre property include a fitness center, clubhouse, film lounge and pool tables.

Residents can also access a community lounge, video game room, library and about 245 parking spaces.

Technology usage in commercial real estate has reached a point where those who don’t adopt it will find themselves left behind. But what is technology for its own sake and what offers solutions that make a tangible difference for commercial brokers? It’s a question that Buildout CEO Jason Tillery and his team seek to find answers for. Connect CRE spoke with Tillery recently for his take on the pace of change brought on by tech and how to find tools that work.

Q: Are we seeing more technological advances each year? Everything from vaccine development to electric vehicles and artificial intelligence feels like it’s coming at us so much faster than ever before. Do you have any perspectives to offer on what makes this moment in technology unique?

A: In a way, I don’t think this is really a unique time. Technology has always been progressing and it’s always been accelerating. What makes it different is how it’s perceived within a single human’s lifetime.

Two hundred years ago, you could expect to live a life that was basically the same as your parents. And that had been true for the thousand previous years as well. But starting about 100 years ago, that was no longer true. Because of things like cars and planes and telephones, you could expect to live a life that didn’t look like your parents’ lives. Later on, in the last century, progress started moving fast enough that you would see change within your own life and live a different life in middle age than you would in your childhood. That became exciting, And the theme of the whole century was progress. Everybody was hopeful about what the future may bring. It’s been true up until recently that we could expect to see this kind of accelerating, exciting change.

As waves of technology came, you could see them changing the world around you. We started hearing about the Internet in the early ‘90s. And it didn’t really change the world for about 15 years. So you had a lot of time to adapt to that change. If you didn’t change your business in 1997 to adapt to the Internet, that was fine. But if you hadn’t changed by 2007, you were probably in trouble. Then we saw a wave of technological change come with mobile and social, and you still had time—you didn’t have to adopt all this in 2006. But if you waited 10 years, it was too long. What’s different now is the pace as it relates to us as humans. What’s happened in the last year with AI is so jarring, because it’s already had such a huge impact on society and we’re just not equipped as people to adapt to change that quickly. So I don’t think this is a unique moment from the perspective that technology is coming and it’s coming faster and faster. What’s unique is that we’ve broken a barrier beyond which people are just not equipped to adapt, and the hard fact is it’s only going to go faster from here. This is sort of the new way of life for us.

Q: Is replacement something that commercial real estate brokers need to be afraid of?

A: Everybody should always be vigilant about the fact that as a society changes, they have to change or get left behind. That’s always been true. You just don’t have as much time to adapt now, so you can’t afford to wait five or 10 years before adopting these tools, because the world around you will be filled with people who do and become a lot more efficient. One bit of good news is that commercial real estate brokers are not playing a zero-sum game the way that so many businesses are. If you’re a restaurant, people only eat so much, or if you’re a dentist and you find a way to use AI and robotics to fill five times as many cavities, we’re only going to need one-fifth as many dentists in the world, because people don’t just go in and have that stuff done for fun. But that’s not true for brokers. If a broker calls a building owner and convinces them to sell their building, that is a deal that materializes out of thin air. And so they’re making this economy happen. If they went away, a lot fewer deals would be done. So it’s not a zero-sum game. And the efficiency gains that brokers see will result in many more transactions. But the people who don’t do it are probably going to disappear. For the brokers who miss this train, there’s probably not going to be a great future.

Q: How does Buildout recommend its clients evaluate, adopt, and leverage changing technology?

A: The challenge here is that there’s so much stuff appearing on the market. You can’t afford to waste your time evaluating a bunch of things that aren’t going to work. I can tell you that at Buildout over the past decade, I have bought dozens of software products where a very talented salesperson has tried to talk us into why it’s worthwhile to buy their product. It just never works out. The benefits never materialize. On the other hand, when someone comes to you with a solution to a problem that you know you have, that’s when sometimes it really works out. You can’t always believe that what they’re selling actually works. But if it does, it’s going to be worthwhile. We’re trying to help our customers identify as many things in that latter category and as few things in that first category as possible. Now more than ever, you need a vendor you know, with whom you have a relationship that goes beyond a typical vendor relationship, someone who you can consider a partner, someone to whom you can just offload this process of tech evaluation. And that’s what we’re trying to be for our customers.

Q: Where do you think tech can be best implemented to augment/complement the human, relational aspect of work?

A: The job of technology is to clear the runway of all of the incidental work that’s done by a broker. In software, we talk about breaking a task down into its incidental and inherent complexity. You want to eliminate all the incidental complexity that you can because that’s not really what you’re trying to solve for as a broker.

The inherent job of a broker, I believe, is selling a dream. They’re really just a small group of people convincing people to follow their dreams and lease that space or buy that building. When somebody leases a 1,500-square-foot street retail space, they’re not just trying to take possession of the premises and successfully execute a three-year lease. They’re trying to open a coffee shop, and a broker is a partner in pursuing that dream. Same with a factory. If you buy a 50,000-square-foot factory, it’s not because you want to be the owner of a particular property. You’re trying to expand a third-generation business and a broker is part of that story. That is the inherent complexity of their job. It’s going to people and convincing them to make a really important decision about their business and their life. They can do that and they’re good at it.

But what their actual workloads look like isn’t really that. It’s a lot of paperwork and making brochures and driving around and making phone calls and trying just to find the person they’re trying to get ahold of and get them on the phone. That is all incidental. If we can get rid of all that work, everything other than engaging with another human to convince them to make this kind of decision, then that’s the ultimate success for software. I don’t think there’s any clear path to having software replace that last step, which is really what a broker is.

Photo of Jason Tillery by Noah Gelfman.

Skanska has been appointed by Virginia Tech to demolish Randolph Hall and construct Mitchell Hall, a new 285,500 square foot facility for the College of Engineering. The five-story building will expand the campus footprint by over 70% and become the largest building on the Blacksburg campus. Mitchell Hall will feature glass, precast concrete, and Hokie Stone cladding, incorporating the existing stability wind tunnel into its design.  

The building will house a 200-person lecture hall, classrooms, offices, and flexible research spaces, supporting the College’s growth and modern learning and research needs. Construction starts in spring 2024 and is expected to be completed in spring 2028. Skanska has done construction projects at Virginia Tech, including the Undergraduate Science Laboratory Building and the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute Addition. 

Trammell Crow Company and a Georgia Tech development affiliate have completed construction on the first phase of Science Square, a mixed-use development that spans 18 acres and is adjacent to Georgia Tech’s campus in Atlanta, Georgia. The first phase included the delivery of a life science building, known as Science Square Labs, and The Grace, a 14-story residential tower.

The first phase of Science Square includes the delivery of Science Square Labs, a 368,258-square-foot building designed to accommodate state-of-the-art labs and clean-room space. 
 
In addition to Science Square Labs, the first phase of the Science Square development also includes The Grace Residences, a 280-unit multifamily tower that started welcoming its first residents in April. The Grace is comprised of a 14-story tower and a connected six-story mid-rise building. Offering both market-rate and affordable units, the building also offers a club room, an outdoor courtyard with fire pits, grilling areas, and a pool and fitness center.
 

Competition for quality football players often often has more to do with facilities and amenities than season records or a schools legacy. Georgia Tech knows that and is modernizing its historic football stadium.

Georgia Tech officials recently broke ground on the Thomas A. Fanning Student-Athlete Performance Center, a project designed by The S/L/A/M Collaborative and to be built by DPR Construction, both Atlanta-based companies. 

The 100,000-square-foot expansion is happening at the northeast corner of the century-old stadium—now called Bobby Dodd Stadium at Hyundai Field.

The performance center will house areas for athlete strength and conditioning, sports medicine, nutrition, academic support, and Tech athletics’ Total Person Program. Other facets will include expanded space specifically for Georgia Tech football, to include a football-only players’ lounge, meeting spaces, and strength-and-conditioning facilities. The Fanning Center will also be equipped with Tech’s first sports science lab, which uses pro-model motion tracking to analyze student-athletes’ performance data.