If you're looking for a tailored site in the right location, with enough research intelligence to prove that the market is worthy of your product or services, you may want to give RealtiCorp a call.

The idea for RealtiCorp came about in the late 1960s when Dan Bruce, founder and CEO of RealtiCorp, started a computerized site selection company called Diran Corporation. Unfortunately, the company fell victim to the real estate recession in 1974, so Bruce went back to doing what he always did -- real estate trading. But the idea resurfaced 5 years ago, when Bruce and partner, T. Walter Brashier, a successful real estate entrepreneur, started RealtiCorp, a Land Fund which buys and sells mixed-use and single-purpose land parcels for retail, multifamily, office, industrial and single-family developments.

"There is a definite need for what we are providing," says Bruce. "There is a very needed capital source or requirement for land transactions, which are actually much more complex than vertical development because the construction and development is a fairly programmatic and predictive process."

The land part is complex due to complications such as development constraints and entitlement issues, according to Bruce.

"The municipalities have become much more stringent in terms of the permitting process," he says. "Each area is somewhat different. If you're in a small state like South Carolina, doing business in one part of the state, such as Greenville, is very different from doing business in another part, such as Charleston, with all of the historic preservation issues."

But RealtiCorp, says Bruce, has gotten quite good at recognizing and moving through those processes in the past 5 years. The company's business crosses all property types and works with a number of retail users. The majority of its customers are multi-site users, from large big box users to multifamily users to office real estate investment trusts. RealtiCorp subdivides or assembles commercial real estate as a forward purchaser for these large groups of users who require sites in multiple locations.

Investment Capital

RealtiCorp essentially provides two basic services -- real estate investment capital and research -- to four strategic alliances: developers, tenant reps, strategic landowners and local brokers. The real estate investment capital is an unusual source of capital in that it is specifically for mixed-use properties that are ready to be developed, says Bruce.

For example, in Concord/Kannapolis, North Carolina, the company recently launched NorthLite Center, a $50 million mixed-use retail center that will contain up to 700,000 square feet of building space. RealtiCorp will begin developing the site immediately, moving 1 million cubic yards of earth and constructing a four-lane public road connecting Dale Earnhardt Boulevard to Highway 136. RealtiCorp purchased the 110-acre site from T. David Propst on April 2, 2002. The first NorthLite Center sale was to Wal-Mart, which purchased 37 acres to develop and open a Wal-Mart Supercenter and a Sam's Club. The remaining large development tracts are primarily under contract or have a letter of intent as there has been substantial interest from complementary retail and service establishments. There are a significant number of out pads, 13 currently, which are available for resale.

"It's a typical situation where you've got a very complex piece of property that none of the users would have gone to by themselves, yet the sellers needed to sell it all in one piece," says Bruce. "We'll sell outright, we'll joint venture; our whole program is geared toward providing services for the types of problems that all of these users face."

Another problem solved was a huge automotive retail void on Satellite Boulevard near Gwinnett Place Mall in Atlanta.

"Some of the car dealers were getting so packed, they were having to work from the mall parking lot," says Bruce.

So RealtiCorp sold 10.74 acres to car dealer Chuck Simpson who plans to build a Subaru and another car sales facility. The site was part of a 40-acre tract that RealtiCorp purchased over 4 years ago. The company has approximately 10 acres remaining, a portion of which is under contract to another car dealer; the deal is scheduled to close in several months. The total land sales have been over $11.5 million. RealtiCorp invested over $1 million in site work and rock excavation. The company also installed roads, water, sewage and drainage to the property that was then subdivided and sold to various users, including Simpson, Hertz, CarTech and O'Storage.

RealtiCorp also sold a 4-acre site to Daewoo Motors. However, Chuck Simpson recently purchased the Daewoo facility and plans to operate it as an Infinity Dealership. Remaining available sites include outparcels on Satellite Boulevard and sites with frontage on I-85. RealtiCorp believes that this might be some of the last C-3 automotive-zoned land available in the area.

On the other side of Atlanta, in Alpharetta, RealtiCorp has another large mixed-use development called Brookside, a 207-acre development, of which 4.4 acres remain. Brookside is located on the east side of Georgia 400 and offers 6,500 linear feet of frontage on Old Milton Parkway. High-end residential, numerous class A office buildings and a super-regional mall surround the large mixed-use development.

This past May, the company sold .84 acres to Bruster's, the ice cream and yogurt establishment, and .84 acres to Boos Development Group, a company which has plans to build a Tires Plus store. To date, RealtiCorp has sold or donated over 200 acres at Brookside with current sales totaling $21.6 million. Other purchasers include Weeks Corporation (now Duke Realty), which purchased just over 31 acres for office development; Georgia State University, which bought over 10 acres, with RealtiCorp donating almost 12.5 additional acres to them; The Alter Group, which purchased close to 42 acres for office development; and Radiant Systems, which bought 32 acres to build their corporate office. RealtiCorp also donated 28.7 acres to the city of Alpharetta for a recreational park.

SiteWorks

The second service RealtiCorp provides through its strategic alliances is state-of-the-art research and technology that specifically helps define and confirm market voids, or unmet customer demand, for specific types of user product and services. The company does this through SiteWorks, a site acquisition solution that provides users with more choices, better-qualified sites, reduced risks and self-development opportunities.

Bruce compares it to what the U.S. military's AWACS program does with high-tech surveillance satellites and planes. "They can track all types of things, but they cannot be effective unless they have people on the ground with GPS transponders and that sort of thing," he says. "Our system really parallels that. We can track multi-site users. We can invert the data and tell you where the competition is located, because it's all SIC code related. We can bore down on a site and come up with the ideal customer profile matrix. We can overlay that on the markets and tell you where there are voids in the market where there is unmet customer demand. And we can take it all the way down to a level with the best location for a particular user."

But the system involves much more than technology. It's the ability to go through all of these issues that are related to a complex process in an efficient manner, Bruce adds.

"The thing that we are providing to the end customer is a site that best suits their particular model and their distribution pattern," he notes. "It's the ideal dirt that their particular model grows best in. We feel that we've become pretty good at being able to determine that, and we determine it by using our strategic alliances with developers, tenant reps, strategic land owners and local brokers."

RealtiCorp plans to take its land investment concept nationwide. Currently, the company has six regional offices in the Southeast and Southwest: Atlanta; Charleston, South Carolina; Charlotte, North Carolina; Orlando, Florida; Richmond, Virginia; and Houston.

Handling the complexities of its clients' multi-site transactions saves customers time and money, says Bruce. "If you are a developer, for example, or one of our alliance partners, getting capital to do a complex mixed-use land deal is difficult," he says. Solutions like SiteWorks help users reduce dead deal costs by resolving issues prior to investment and save time by reducing travel. SiteWorks can also provide clients with access to real-time project information, such as due diligence status, through a secure Internet portal.

What RealtiCorp provides is a very needed capital resource that's quite unique, according to Bruce. "I really can't think of any other capital resource that's like ours in that we are providing and using capital in a very focused way in a unique market niche," he says. "Obviously, there are people buying complex pieces of property, but doing it in a systematic, programmatic fashion? I'm unaware of anyone doing that."

©2002 France Publications, Inc. Duplication or reproduction of this article not permitted without authorization from France Publications, Inc. For information on reprints of this article contact Barbara Sherer at (630) 554-6054.