Buckhead’s largest office complex is facing foreclosure after its lender alleges the owner defaulted on its mortgage.
Piedmont Center, comprising 14 buildings across 46 acres along Piedmont Road, has been scheduled for an auction next month, according to a Fulton County public notice. Lender Morgan Stanley filed to foreclose on the $330.8 million loan backing the property after Ardent Cos. did not make timely debt payments.
The sale is scheduled before the courthouse steps on Feb. 4, according to the notice.
An Ardent Cos. executive declined to comment.
A foreclosure notice signals a lender’s intent to take back the property underlying the mortgage, but a filing does not guarantee that a foreclosure will happen. The borrower and lender could come to another arrangement to halt the proceeding.
The Atlanta Business Chronicle was first to report the notice.
Ardent Cos. began to acquire portions of Piedmont Center between 2016 and 2021 with plans to transform the campus to better reflect the wants and need of modern office tenants.
Even though it’s located in the heart of the city, Piedmont Center is an example of the suburban office properties of yesteryear. Construction on the campus began in 1981, a time when vacant land in Buckhead was much more plentiful than it is now. Piedmont Center’s 14 buildings span 2.2 million square feet. That’s more floor space than Buckhead’s Lenox Square mall and the retail portion of Atlantic Station.
Ardent added spec suites, which are turnkey office spaces, and announced plans to repurpose 35,000 square feet of ground-floor office space into a food-and-beverage concept called Oxton. It also added a coworking operator to its lineup of tenants. Switchyards, a fast-growing operator based in Atlanta, opened up an outpost in 2022.
Real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle was marketing the property in recent months. Promotional materials say the property is 63% leased and that it “represents a generational opportunity to control a prominent position in the Buckhead office market.”
This is the first major office foreclosure auction set for this year. It comes after a relatively quiet period for the Atlanta office sector, which saw several of its legacy towers and prime sites go before auctions in late 2022 and 2023 as vacancy rates lingered at near-highs after the COVID-19 pandemic and interest rates remained elevated.
Metro Atlanta experienced an uptick in leasing activity in 2024, especially large transactions. But woes in the office sector still persist in the city and the nation at large. About one-third of all the office space in metro Atlanta is available, according to commercial real estate firm CBRE’s most recent quarterly report. This accounts for space that is both vacant and available for sublease.
This isn’t positive news for the city and Atlanta’s suburbs — office buildings with fewer tenants are worth less than buildings that are full. When the values of commercial properties decrease, the amount of tax revenue generated from them that support schools, courts and public safety, among other public services, also decreases.
To address the vacancy problem, a number of developers are rehabbing suburban office properties or demolishing them entirely. Last month, Portman Holdings, the firm behind Coda at Tech Square and Junction at Krog Street, filed plans to redevelop Alpharetta’s Brookside office campus off Old Milton Parkway into apartments, townhomes and retail. The plans call for razing one of the two office buildings on the site.
But not every empty office building in the city is suitable for renovation or conversion, and not every transformation attracts new tenants.
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