The Walton Westphalia Development Corp. has sold a piece of its 310-acre development site in Prince George’s County, enabling it pay down a substantial portion of the debt it took out to advance the long-planned project.
An affiliate of the company sold the 58-acre property known as Phase 1A, slated for roughly 655 residential units, for about $14.15 million on Thursday, according to a representative for Walton Global Holdings Ltd., the Calgary, Alberta-based parent company of the Westphalia developer Walton disclosed the sale to Galaxy NC, LLC, an affiliate of Virginia Beach residential developer LM Sandler & Sons Inc., in a press release Thursday.
LM Sandler & Sons will be overseeing horizontal development of the property, preparing individual lots for future sale to home builders, Fleming said. Representatives for the company could not be immediately reached for comment.
Walton used proceeds from the sale to pay down a substantial portion of its outstanding senior debt, which hovered at about $15.1 million prior to the transaction, according to previously released financial data.
The property that sold is on a different part of Westphalia than where Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) hoped to operate a massive fulfillment center, a prospect the Seattle-based e-commerce and cloud computing company pulled off he table in the face of community pushback in August.
The window for that opportunity, which stood to help trigger the development of additional parts of Westphalia, including a planned grocery-anchored retail center, has closed, said Ed Fleming, executive vice president.
The sale completes a process Walton Westphalia has been working on for more than a year and puts the developer on better financial footing to advance other parts of the project, including the retail center. Westphalia is already home to a few hundred single-family homes and townhomes.
Walton Westphalia continues talks with an undisclosed local retail developer for that part of the planned development, Fleming said, and the company hopes to disclose more information about that in the next 45 days. There’s been no movement yet on the 79-acre parcel where Amazon was planning its fulfillment center.
