When energy giant Southern Co. decided to vacate the Evercare building about 30 miles south of Augusta, Georgia, it didn't take long for Sherman & Hemstreet Real Estate Group to find a replacement tenant at the industrial property.
The Augusta-based real estate firm quickly signed Ritz Instrument Transformers, which manufactures and tests current and voltage transformers, to take more than 130,000 square feet at the 243,240-square-foot industrial building at 1 Evercare Way. Lichtenberg & Co., headed by Scott Lichtenberg, owns the 23-year-old building in Burke County, Georgia.
For Ritz, the transaction marks a return to Waynesboro, where the firm opened a factory in 1991 and then sold it in 2006 when its German parent company restructured. Because the lease allowed the owner to instantly backfill the property, Ritz's deal for the Evercare building earned the 2023 CoStar Impact Award for the best lease in the Augusta-Richmond County market, as judged by real estate professionals familiar with the market.
"The return to Waynesboro is expected to generate over 200 employees in the next few years," Sherman & Hemstreet President Joe Edge said in nominating the lease transaction. “The Burke County Development Authority has been working on trying to get Ritz back to the area for a while, but it wasn’t until the right building opened up that a deal could be put together. There isn’t a lot of inventory in the county and the building never saw a day it didn’t have a tenant."
Edge, who represented the landlord, said Ritz went into the building the day after Southern Co. moved out.
About the project: Southern Co.'s decision to move out of the Evercare building in Waynesboro, Georgia, opened the door for Ritz Instrument Transformers to return to Waynesboro, where it operated a factory for several years before selling it in 2006. Ritz is expected to create scores of new jobs at the facility.
What the judges said: "This is a large leased space that returned a former company to the area," Shaun Roberts of NAI G2 Commercial said.
Ernie Smallman of Coldwell Banker Commercial-KPPD said the "size of lease and challenge of leasing large space to a single tenant" made the deal worthy of an award.
They made it happen: Joe Edge, president, Sherman & Hemstreet Real Estate Group.