Woodstock Downtown bounces back

Woodstock Downtown, a CNU Award-winning development that fell into foreclosure, is springing back to life. All 260 townhouses and detached houses in the Woodstock, Georgia, project have been sold. Ninety condominium units in a distinctive 5-story row of housing over retail are also gradually finding buyers, says Cheri Morris of Morris & Fellows.

Morris’s firm had teamed up with Hedgewood Properties — master developer of Woodstock Downtown — to produce the 32-acre project’s commercial components. “Woodstock Downtown was always very successful,” Morris said, but it got entangled in foreclosure after Hedgewood became a victim of the financial meltdown of 2008, when real estate sales in the Atlanta area came almost to a halt.

Morris & Fellows bought some of the properties back from the banks, and recently began leasing out the ground-floor retail spaces again. People who toured the development during CNU 18 in Atlanta were impressed by its restaurant area, which has been configured as a line of buildings and outdoor dining areas that look toward the shops in the base of the five-story main structure. Three of the project’s seven restaurants have opened, and another will open this month. “The restaurant [sales] volumes are almost 200 percent of national restaurant norms,” she pointed out.

John Wieland Homes, a major Atlanta builder, has bought all of the remaining house lots in the project and will complete the development’s residential portion, Morris said. “Now that we’re getting the real estate back in the hands of real estate folks instead of financial institutions, we are marching forward and finding great success.”