On a cloudless Tuesday morning, The Ardent Cos. lost the sprawling wooded office park it spent years — and hundreds of millions of dollars — assembling to foreclosure.
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Austrian investment firm Bawag Group purchased Piedmont Center, a 2.2M SF office campus in Buckhead, with a $200M credit bid at an auction on the Fulton County Courthouse steps.
Ardent, which is headquartered at Piedmont Center, spent years acquiring parts of the 14-building complex and has owned it in its entirety since 2021. After dodging a takeover attempt from BlackRock in 2023, it defaulted on a $330M floating-rate loan tied to the 46-acre property. One of its lenders, Morgan Stanley Mortgage Capital Holdings, filed to foreclose on the campus in January.
Bawag owns a slice of the debt but bought out the other loan stakeholders last week in preparation for the foreclosure.
More than two dozen people milled about the courthouse steps Tuesday morning, most there to bid on a list of foreclosed residential properties. A few potential investors expressed interest in the auction for Piedmont Center as Holland & Knight Partner Matthew Joe read the foreclosure notice verbatim on the steps — a process that took more than 30 minutes before bidding began because of the size of the property.
Among those waiting to make a bid was Babloo Investments CEO Babloo Bagga, a local investor known for buying residential and commercial properties out of foreclosure. Bagga told Bisnow he had planned to bid $70M for Piedmont Center's 46-acre campus but never got the shot when Joe told the audience that the lender’s bid was $200M.
Ardent Managing Director Scott Werbel didn't respond to a request for comment.
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He made a visible, but silent, “Oooh” when the starting bid price was read. No one else made an offer, and the bidding was over in seconds.
Piedmont Center is 63% leased with a weighted average of 4 years left on the tenants' leases, according to a JLL marketing page for the property. JLL previously marketed the project for sale. A 2020 rezoning would allow CP Group to redevelop some of the campus into residential uses.
A little over an hour after the foreclosure, Atlanta-based CP Group announced it purchased Piedmont Center in an all-cash transaction.
“Piedmont Center’s scale and iconic presence in the heart of Buckhead presents a rare opportunity to reimagine a legacy campus for the future,” CP Group Founding Partner Chris Eachus said in a statement.
Eachus was present at the foreclosure but declined to comment about its involvement in Piedmont Center.
CP Group is one of Atlanta's largest commercial real estate owners, and the Piedmont Center brings its local portfolio — which includes Bank of America Plaza and CNN Center, now called The Center, in Downtown Atlanta — to more than 8M SF, according to the press release.
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A source with knowledge of the transaction previously told Bisnow that CP Group would partner with Bawag on Piedmont Center, but the Austrian investment firm wasn't mentioned in its press release.
CP Group didn't offer a price or details on the transaction as of press time. A spokesperson for the firm declined to comment further.
“Bawag is definitely still the majority owner here,” Joe, who was representing the lender, told Bisnow after being shown the release.
CP Group plans to transform the office campus into “a highly amenitized, hospitality-driven campus” with new food and beverage concepts, renovated lobbies and conference rooms, and revitalized outdoor and common areas. It also plans to design fully furnished, move-in-ready office spec suites.
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