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The Crown Holding Group is trading in chickens for sugar cane and feta cheese.
The Atlanta developer sold the former Gold Kist headquarters building and the 15-acre site in Central Perimeter to a joint venture between RocaPoint Partners and New York-based The Georgetown Co. for an undisclosed sum.
“It wasn't a motivation to sell. They came in at a price that we liked,” Crown Holding co-founder Blair Schlossberg said.
For years, Gold Kist, a Southern poultry company that later became known as Pilgrim's Pride, used the three-story building as its headquarters. The last major tenant, Cotton States Insurance, vacated the property in 2011.
Crown purchased the site in 2013 and had planned to transform it into a massive mixed-use project that would overlook Interstate 285, including plans for a 24-story office tower, a 28-story hotel and other developments.
Officials with RocaPoint Partners, which is developing the Halcyon mixed-use project off Georgia 400 in Forsyth County, did not return messages seeking comment.
Schlossberg said Crown plans to redeploy the capital to other projects in its pipeline, including hotel projects in Greece and Puerto Rico.
“It is still, in our mind, the best piece of real estate in the Atlanta market for development, and these are the right guys to make it happen,” Schlossberg said.
Officials with Georgetown and RocaPoint told the Atlanta Business Chronicle that the joint venture intends to first renovate the 265K SF former Gold Kist headquarters building on the site into “cool office space” that will merge the outdoors into the design. The developers are also planning for a timber-framed office building on the site.
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