Dewberry's Midtown Eyesore Quietly Resolves $75M Mortgage
The husk of John Dewberry’s Campanile Building in Midtown is now clear of debt.
ACORE Capital, which controlled a $75M loan on the 20-story tower, returned the title to an LLC controlled by the real estate mogul, according to a quitclaim deed filed in Fulton County Superior Court. A quitclaim deed transfers title of a property from one party to another and is usually used in property sales or when a mortgage is satisfied.
The deed, filed in February, means Dewberry fully owns the 446K SF property at 14th and Peachtree streets northeast — known as Midtown’s biggest eyesore — without the former ACORE debt encumbering it. While Dewberry’s plans for Campanile remain cloudy, removing the mortgage on it could ease some pressure for him to resume redevelopment of the property or sell the empty tower.
Dewberry and ACORE didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The 21-story, gutted high-rise has been an inactive construction site for at least six years and has been deemed unsafe by city officials. Earlier this month, scaffolding at the site collapsed onto the sidewalk, Urbanize Atlanta reported.
Dewberry, a former Georgia Tech quarterback, bought the tower in 2010 for $36M in a distressed sale. By 2017, Dewberry announced plans for a full-scale redevelopment, including stripping off the facade to eventually replace it with a glassy new exterior. But the project was beset by delays, including the pandemic shutting down construction activity.
The maverick developer renamed Campanile as The Midtowne in 2022. He said then that he planned to add six floors to the top of the tower and expand the square footage at the base for office and retail.
But despite his insistence to Bisnow last year that construction activity was taking place inside the empty tower, local officials have cast doubt and expressed frustration at the lack of progress. In June, the Atlanta City Council unanimously approved a resolution to urge Mayor Andre Dickens to impose a blight tax against Campanile, which could propel Dewberry’s general tax bill for the property from $91K to $2.3M. Dickens had yet to levy the tax as of Wednesday.
The ACORE loan is no longer attached to the building, but it wasn’t clear if Dewberry paid all the $75M in debt owed to ACORE.
According to the quitclaim document, Dewberry obtained a more than $59M loan in February from JPMorgan Chase backed by a host of other properties in his portfolio, including the land between West Peachtree and Peachtree streets along 17th Street in Midtown. JPMorgan also used 7 acres along West Peachtree Street overlooking Interstate 85 as collateral for the new loan. JPMorgan didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Stephanie Friese, an Atlanta commercial real estate lawyer at Bradley, told Bisnow after reviewing the quitclaim deed that the JPMorgan loan was likely used to help pay down the outstanding ACORE loan. A $15.6M balance, however, would still remain on the original loan.
Dewberry has courted plenty of controversy during his career, especially surrounding Campanile. He has held on to that land for years, inspiring Bloomberg in 2017 to dub him the “Emperor of Empty Lots.”
As of September, Dewberry appeared not to be under any pressure to churn some of his other vacant land holdings into new developments.
“I’m the last of the Mohicans,” Dewberry told Bisnow at the time. “I can wait if we want to.”
