This Week in Metro Atlanta: A Dead Tower at Spaghetti Junction Gets Its Permit, and Dunwoody's Biggest Office Goes Up for Sale

Three items this week, and they rhyme in a way I did not expect. All three are buildings that have been sitting empty or are about to change hands, and in each case somebody just put real money or a real date behind what happens next. A 14-story tower at Spaghetti Junction that has been dark since 2012. A pair of Dunwoody office towers that are completely full and went on the market anyway. A Walmart grocery in East Cobb that closed more than two years ago.

Start with the one that got its permit Monday. DeKalb County issued a land disturbance permit for 4001 Presidential Parkway, the round 14-story tower you have driven past a thousand times at the I-85 and I-285 interchange. Aramar Investments, an Atlanta-based multifamily firm, is converting it into 282 market-rate apartments at a stated cost of $53.3 million. The mix is 76 studios, 150 one-bedrooms, 52 two-bedrooms and four penthouses across roughly 150,000 square feet on about seven acres. The building went up in 1973, closed as a hotel in 1987 after fourteen years, and has been vacant since 2012, when it was last the Ramada Perimeter Northeast with a nightclub in it. It has already been gutted to the concrete frame. County records show the property sold in June for just under $2.5 million to an LLC formed in January. DeKalb CEO Lorraine Cochran-Johnson called the permit meaningful progress toward turning one of the county's most visible vacant properties into a productive residential community.

A land disturbance permit is a real milestone and not a groundbreaking. No completion date has been announced and nobody has published a construction schedule, so if you live within a mile of that interchange, do not price your house today on 282 new neighbors arriving on a specific date. What I would take seriously is the direction. Adaptive reuse of a gutted 1973 tower is a hard, expensive way to build apartments, and $53.3 million for 282 units is roughly $189,000 a door before land. Somebody ran that math and decided the location carried it. The argument is access: county figures put more than 426,000 vehicles past that site daily. That is enormous visibility and, if you are renting there, a lot of highway. For owners in Chamblee, Doraville and the Northlake side of that corridor, the honest version is that one of the area's most visible blighted properties is coming out of the blight column, and that is worth more to the neighborhood over five years than it is to your appraisal this fall.

Second, and the most important of the three even though nothing is being built. KDC has listed Park Center II and III in Dunwoody, the two towers State Farm occupies next to MARTA's Dunwoody Station, about 1.1 million square feet together. Park Center II is roughly 621,000 square feet including about 39,000 of ground-floor retail; Park Center III is about 440,000. Newmark has the listing. The reported numbers differ and I am going to say so rather than pick the better one: Hoodline puts the asking price near $450 million, while the AJC reports the price was not disclosed and cites Green Street News saying the deal could draw record bids for an Atlanta-area office sale. Both agree on the part that matters, which is the lease. State Farm has roughly ten years left with about $527 million in remaining rent obligations, backed by the insurer's credit. On headcount the sources also differ, from more than 6,000 to about 7,000 on that campus, so treat it as several thousand rather than a precise figure.

This does not mean State Farm is leaving. The lease says otherwise, and Dunwoody's economic development office made the same point: office buildings are investment assets and they trade. The signal is money coming back to Atlanta office. Metro vacancy is still around 29 percent, which is a terrible number, but Central Perimeter specifically came down to 24.3 percent in the second quarter, two full points better than a year earlier, and Atlanta office sales roughly doubled in the first half of 2026 by the AJC's account, with Hoodline putting the figure at $2.9 billion. Institutional buyers sat out for four years. A full, MARTA-adjacent, investment-grade-tenant asset is what they come back for first. If you have been holding a Central Perimeter condo or townhouse on the theory that an office recovery eventually pulls the submarket with it, this is the first genuinely supporting data point in a while. It is one trade, not a trend. I would not change a selling decision over it. I would change how I read the next two.

Third, East Cobb, and this one has a date. The former Walmart Neighborhood Market at Olde Mill Shopping Center, at Roswell Road and Old Canton Road, has been empty for more than two years. A franchisee named Jay Mathis wants to put 46,761 square feet of Pickle Pad and Crave Social Eatery in it: twelve pickleball courts, four golf simulators, an arcade, a kitchen and a bar, open 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week. He is asking to rezone from Neighborhood Retail Commercial to Community Activity Center. Cobb staff recommend a different path, keeping the NRC zoning and attaching a special exception for indoor sports instead. The Cobb Planning Commission takes it up October 8, and Mathis has said he wants to open by January if the rezoning clears next month. He lives in East Cobb, has kids at Pope and Hightower Trail, and is looking at more metro locations including Kennesaw, The Battery and near Perimeter Mall.

If you own near Olde Mill, pay attention to which version passes, not just whether something passes. A special exception is narrow and attaches to this use at this site. A rezoning to Community Activity Center changes what the parcel can become for whoever owns it in ten years, and that is a much bigger grant than twelve pickleball courts. Staff recommending against the broader rezoning while supporting the business is the right instinct, and it is the outcome I would want if I lived on the streets behind that center. On the other side, a 46,000-square-foot dark anchor is a real drag on a neighborhood shopping center, and everything else in there has been operating next to it for two years. Something open until 10 p.m. changes traffic on Roswell Road and changes what the rest of the center can lease to. October 8 is a public hearing and showing up is free.

The dates worth keeping: October 8 if you own near Olde Mill in East Cobb. Nothing scheduled yet on the Presidential tower, which is the point, so watch for a building permit rather than a press release. And no date at all on the Dunwoody towers, because a listing is not a sale. If you want to know whether any of this touches a specific address, send me the address and I will tell you straight.