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Shopping Centers Today -> June 2004
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COUSINS DEVELOPING CENTERS IN SOUTH
BY IAN RITTER
Cousins Properties is continuing its expansion in the South with two large open-air centers.
Cousins and its partner, Montgomery, Ala.-based Jim Wilson & Associates, broke ground last month on The Avenue Carriage Crossing, an 800,000-square-foot lifestyle center in Collierville, Tenn., about 30 miles southeast of Memphis. Also last month, Cousins and two other developers — Simon Property Group and Cincinnati-based North American Properties — said they plan to build South Point, a $200 million mixed-use center in McDonough, Ga., in Henry County, about 31 miles southeast of Atlanta. South Point is to comprise 1 million square feet of retail, 500,000 square feet of office space and 1,000 residential units.
The developers have announced no retailers for South Point so far, but they say they want to begin opening some stores in the spring of 2006 and finish work by 2007.
Carriage Crossing is Cousins’ sixth Avenue center. (The firm currently operates three in Atlanta and one in Los Angeles.) Cousins is also at work on The Avenue Viera (Fla.), about 58 miles southeast of Orlando, on which it broke ground last October. Completion is set for the fall.
And more Avenue projects will follow as opportunities arise, says Matt Gove, a Cousins spokesman. “We are hoping to start a number of them over the next couple of years,” he said.
Carriage Crossing is “our most ambitious Avenue yet,” said Joel T. Murphy, Cousins’ president of retail, noting that it will be the largest Avenue center the company has built so far.
Cousins and Jim Wilson expect to open Carriage Crossing in October of next year, with Dillard’s and Parisian as anchors; the other tenants will include Abercrombie & Fitch, Barnes & Noble and Hollister. The center was 73 percent leased at press time.
Atlanta-based Cousins operates 10 centers, mostly in the Southeast. It has not previously worked with any of the three companies involved in Carriage Crossing and South Point. The company, founded in 1958, also owns 13.9 million square feet of office space and has built more than 3,000 multifamily residential units.
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