Beleaguered Kennesaw Regional Mall Goes Back To Lender
An Atlanta lender has taken back a major Cobb County mall after its owner narrowly avoided foreclosure two years earlier.
An affiliate of The Ardent Cos. on July 7 foreclosed on the $46.7M loan it made to New York-based Kohan Retail Investment Group for Town Center at Cobb, according to property records posted in the Georgia Superior Court Clerks' Cooperative Authority database.
An LLC tied to Ardent was the top bidder at $51.75M, according to documents. Alan Wexler, the founder of Atlanta real estate tracking firm Databank, said the amount over the loan was likely unpaid interest and other expenses.
The foreclosure ends Kohan’s long-troubled ownership of the 1.3M SF mall in Kennesaw, more than 20 miles north of one of Metro Atlanta’s most prominent indoor malls, Lenox Square in Buckhead.
What comes next for Town Center remains unclear.
Ardent partner Scott Werbel declined to comment on the foreclosure. Kohan CEO Mike Kohan did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
Kohan, a prolific Northeast mall investor, bought the Cobb County mall in January 2023 for $71M, after Deutsche Bank foreclosed on its original $166.7M loan from Simon Property Group two years before, the Atlanta Business Chronicle previously reported, forcing the bank to take a $96.5M loan loss.
The firm purchased the 560K SF main retail portion of Town Center. JCPenney and Macy’s owned their separate department store locations in the mall.
While the mall suffered declining sales prior to Kohan’s purchase, the property was more than 90% leased when the New York investor acquired it in 2023, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
In 2024, Kohan became arrears in paying its property taxes to Cobb County and owed more than $1M, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported at the time. A year later, Cobb County shut off the power temporarily over unpaid bills, according to the AJC.
Kohan narrowly avoided foreclosure when it refinanced a $42M loan from Augusta-based Hull Property Group, Bisnow previously reported. During Kohan’s ownership, the mall continued to lose tenants, with Belk shuttering its location last year and the longstanding Chick-fil-A closing its food court location at the mall due to deteriorating sales, Tomorrow’s News Today Atlanta reported.
In February 2025, a Gwinnett County Superior Court judge placed Town Center under receivership with an Ardent affiliate, AFF V Noonday LP, which paid the back taxes and attempted to stabilize operations, the AJC reported.
Kohan’s $46.7M loan to Ardent matured on Feb. 15 of this year, according to the loan document filed with the superior court database.
Earlier this year, the Marietta Daily Journal reported that more than 40 retail spaces were vacant in the beleaguered mall.
Kohan is no stranger to trouble with its portfolio. The firm owns more than 30 malls across the U.S. and in recent years has faced criticism from local government officials over various properties that it has let languish or failed to pay local taxes on.
Savannah Mall fell into disrepair under Kohan’s ownership before the firm sold it in 2022. The city of Marshalltown, Iowa, pursued Kohan over repair code violations while it owned the mall in 2024. Kohan sold the property earlier this year for more than $8M, KCCI Des Moines reported.
Kohan’s Livingston Mall in New Jersey declined for years under its ownership, with no air or heating and back taxes worth $3M, and its last tenant, Barnes & Noble, expected to move out later this month, the West Essex Tribune reported.
Nick Egelanian, president of retail consulting firm SiteWorks, told the Tribune that Kohan is a “liquidator” of malls by acquiring dying malls, making nearly zero investments in them and cutting expenses to a bare minimum while collecting rents, allowing the company to make strong returns on borrowed money.
“They bought them to collect the rent for as long as they could and cut the cost as deeply as they could. They don’t tell the world they’re liquidators, but they’re liquidators,” Egelanian told the publication. “It’s a business model that they’ve made millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars on.”
