Jamestown Partners Acquires Green Street Properties, Providing Capital Investment

By Erika Schnitzer, Associate EditorAtlanta—Jamestown Partners, a real estate investment and management company, recently announced its acquisition of Green Street Properties, an eco-conscious consulting and development company best known for its master-planned, mixed-use urban communities.“We believe that the future of real estate is closely linked with green initiatives. The acquisition helps us to be at the forefront of this movement,” explains Matt Bronfman, managing director at Jamestown. “We see Green Street as able to bring some unique new opportunities to Jamestown. We also see them providing insights into our existing portfolio, such as ‘greening,’ as well as adding value in more traditional ways.”Jamestown will provide support for Green Street’s business operations, as well as capital investment. Additionally, Green Street will be able to benefit from Jamestown’s national recognition.“We see this very much as a win-win for the two companies and we feel that the partnership with Jamestown will give us a platform to maximize future opportunities and broaden our impact to a national level,” says Katharine Kelley, president and CEO, Green Street Properties. In addition to Kelley, Walter Brown and Amy Merrit Swick are the principals of Green Street, with Alix Rice also a member of the team. Kelley will continue in her role as president and CEO of Green Street Properties. With this acquisition, Green Street will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Jamestown, continuing to use its own name, and according to Kelley, the Green Street team will remain intact.“The downturn in development opportunities has caused us to focus more on green consulting opportunities in the near term and to focus on those opportunities until the market is in a position to allow us to ramp up our mixed-use developments again. You have to be flexible right now to adapt to the market,” Kelley tells MHN.  With the downturn in the market, she asserts, “most firms are not in the position to build new buildings or launch new projects, but they are able to look at existing assets and determine how to make incremental green improvements with incremental amounts of capital that will allow them to reduce costs and improve the performance of those assets. In a market like this, everyone is looking to cut costs and focusing on the sustainability of real estate assets.”Green Street’s most recent development, Glenwood Park (site plan pictured), is a nationally recognized sustainable, new urbanist community, located on 28 acres just east of downtown Atlanta. A $150 million mixed-use brownfield development, Glenwood Park includes approximately 328 residential units, including condominiums, live/work residences, townhouses and single-family homes, in addition to 20,000 sq. ft. of office space and 50,000 sq. ft. of retail.Glenwood Park was the first multifamily geothermal project in Georgia, the first multifamily project in the state to receive an Energy Star tax credit and the first green zero-energy Southern Living House in America. In addition, Glenwood Park was one of the pilot projects in EarthCraft House, a residential green building program in the metropolitan Atlanta area, and the project received the 2007 EarthCraft Multifamily Project of the Year.