The Anchor Is Buying the Landlord

Publix has been buying out its own landlords again. Commercial Observer reported on October 1 that Publix paid $83.25 million for Airpark Plaza near Miami International Airport, a center it anchors, and REBusinessOnline reported on October 7 that the same seller, First Washington Realty, also sold Publix The Shoppes at Quail Roost on Miami's south side. Both centers were fully leased at the sale, per REBusinessOnline.

Our position: in Publix territory, the grocer is becoming the pad's counterparty. Anyone underwriting an outparcel in a Publix-anchored center should now ask who owns the dirt before asking what the pad lists for. More and more often, the answer is the anchor.

The numbers behind the habit

This is not a one-off. Publix's most recent annual report says it owns both the building and the land at 473 of its supermarkets and owns the building on leased land at 77 more. That is 550 owned locations out of 1,432 stores at the end of 2025. Commercial Observer puts the 2009 figure at 144 owned stores out of 1,014. On those two counts, the owned share has gone from about 14 percent to about 38 percent.

The company says plainly where the money goes. The 10-K lists "the acquisition or development of shopping centers in which the Company operates" among the uses of $2.3 billion in 2025 capital spending. The June 10-Q repeats the same language: $1.5 billion spent in the first half of 2026 and about $1.1 billion more expected for the rest of the year.

Commercial Observer's tenant list for Airpark Plaza includes Burlington, TD Bank, First Watch and The UPS Store. Those are the kinds of tenants we see on pads and in shop space at grocery centers across Florida and Georgia. When Publix buys the center, it also becomes the landlord for those tenants.

What changes for a pad buyer

In our experience, a financial owner of a grocery center is a seller at some price. A pad can be carved off, sold to a net lease buyer, and recycled into the next fund. A grocer that owns its own center has different reasons to hold. It controls who goes next to its front door, what the parking field looks like, and whether a competitor ever gets a lease there. Selling a pad turns that control into a deed restriction instead of a lease clause.

So here is what we would expect in a center the grocer owns, and what we would check before spending money on one:

• Ground lease, not fee. Expect pads to come as ground leases, if they come at all. Price the deal as a lease from day one.
• The declaration is the deal. Read the recorded restrictions and the reciprocal easement agreement before the site plan. When the anchor is also the landlord, the use restrictions are the landlord's own preferences, and nobody else is there to push back on them.
• Longer clocks. Approvals from a corporate real estate department run on its schedule, not a broker's. Build that into the timeline.
• Fewer listed pads. If a market's best grocery centers end up grocer-owned, fewer pads in that market will ever list. The ones that do will be in centers a financial owner still holds.

What we are watching

Florida holds 889 of Publix's 1,432 stores and Georgia holds 220, per the 10-K, so this matters most in the markets we work. We will be watching two things. First, whether the trade press keeps reporting buys like the two Miami deals this fall. Second, how Publix's year-end 10-K updates the owned-store count. A count well above 550 would tell us the buying has kept going.

None of this makes a Publix-anchored pad a worse location. The traffic is the same no matter who owns the center. What changes is who sits across the table, and that party has no reason to hurry.