Sperry Van Ness, DealPoint Merrill Form Strategic Alliance

By Scott Baltic, Contributing Editor

Sterling McGregor, of DealPoint Merrill

Through a new strategic alliance with DealPoint Merrill, of Los Angeles, Sperry Van Ness International Corp., Irvine, Calif., will be expanding its national equities platform, DealPoint Merrill announced Friday.

More specifically, DealPoint Merrill Equities, a subsidiary of DealPoint Merrill and an affiliate of The Merrill Group of Cos., will provide Sperry Van Ness offices and their clients with value-added CRE “co-investment opportunities and development services.” DealPoint Merrill Equities president Michael Gustafson will direct the new partnership.

DealPoint Merrill works primarily on value-added redevelopments and adaptive reuse projects involving retail, self-storage, multi-family, student housing and/or medical offices, Sterling McGregor, the company’s chief investment officer, told Commercial Property Executive.

He sees a good fit between DealPoint’s ongoing search for potential projects, typically involving distressed properties and usually older shopping centers that are under the radar of larger national firms, and the Sperry Van Ness national network of about 175 affiliates, many of them in secondary and tertiary markets.

McGregor also highlighted the different roles the two companies will play: “We do not act as a broker. We operate strictly as principals.”

In fact, he noted that neither he nor fellow DealPoint managing member David Frank has ever been a broker.

McGregor also pointed out that Sperry Van Ness’s internal investment group left the company late last year, so that DealPoint Merrill will now be filling that role.

One of DealPoint Merrill’s signature recent projects was Elizabeth Place, the redevelopment of part of a vacant hospital in Dayton, Ohio, into medical offices.

In a current project, a former Kmart store, vacant for seven years, is being redeveloped for a national retail credit tenant, along with a self-storage facility and two pad sites, one of which has a letter of intent from a fast-food chain.

The company is also currently working on a conversion of a multi-family project in California into student housing.

In all, McGregor said, DealPoint Merrill closed on 825,000 square feet of space last quarter and currently has 1 million square feet of adaptive reuse projects under way.