Waterstone pays $87M for Windsor Square Shopping Center with $63.1M United Bank loan

Waterstone Properties has paid $87 million for Windsor Square Shopping Center, the 659,222-square-foot power center in Matthews, N.C., a price that works out to about $132 a square foot and a trade that says more about scarcity than yield. United Bank originated the $63.1 million acquisition loan, roughly 73 percent of the purchase price and enough to leave close to $24 million of equity in the deal, according to Commercial Edge.

The seller, Hackney Real Estate Partners, held Windsor Square for nearly two years after buying it from Sterling Organization for $70.1 million in November 2024, and the $16.9 million difference is a 24 percent gross gain before capital spending, leasing commissions and closing costs. Nothing in the property's record suggests the gain came from repositioning: the center was completed in 1987, renovated most recently in 2014, and 99 percent leased at the time of sale, with Kohl's, Sam's Club, At Home, Ross Dress for Less, PetSmart and DSW among its anchors. Because neither the seller nor the buyer disclosed a cap rate or any net operating income figure, the deal sets a price per square foot and a loan-to-price ratio without setting a yield marker for the Charlotte market. Atlantic Retail takes over leasing at the center.

Matthews sits on the U.S. 74 retail corridor with direct access to Interstate 485, 11 miles from downtown Charlotte and close to Novant Health Matthews Medical Center, which makes the profile exactly the one retail capital has been paying for while other property types wait on rate relief: infill, anchored and effectively full. The bid for retail now turns on scarcity rather than recovery, as anchored centers and drive-through boxes clear at net-lease-like premiums while unanchored vacancy reprices tenant by tenant. A fully leased power center beside a growing Sun Belt metro is the plainest version of that trade, and it is what $87 million bought here.

Sterling Organization's own direction makes the comparison useful: it sold Windsor Square to Hackney, and PRED reported Sept. 30 that Sterling bought West Hollywood Pavilions Marketplace, a 69,622-square-foot center that is 89 percent leased, for a value-add fund, with no price or seller named. The vacancy there is likely in shop space outside the 54,087-square-foot Pavilions anchor. Sterling may simply be running two strategies at once, but one trade exits a stabilized asset in a Sun Belt suburb while the other takes on a center that still has square footage to lease, and fully leased product now carries a scarcity premium while shop-space vacancy has to be earned back lease by lease.

The announcement does not carry the one number that would tell the market whether $132 a square foot is cheap or full: the rent roll. Until a comparable trade lands with income attached, Windsor Square stands as a marker on price and debt and nothing on yield.