VIRGINIA BEACH, VA—Armada Hoffler Properties has completed a sale of seven grocery-anchored shopping centers with an institutional buyer for $90 million.

The centers included in the transaction total over 630,00 square feet, which is 15% of the company’s retail portfolio. The properties are located in North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland.

The sale was expected to close in Q2 despite the recent market volatility. Back in March, as GlobeSt.com previously reported, the company announced it had entered a definitive agreement with the buyer for $106.5 million. CEO Louis Haddad stated the company planned to use $45 million to pay down debt and move forward with other asset acquisitions.

In a prepared statement, Haddad says the completion of the portfolio sale allows the company to accomplish “a number of short and long-term objectives.”

“In addition to considerably reducing the percentage of retail assets in our portfolio, the proceeds from this sale of unencumbered properties allow us to enhance our liquidity position and create further balance sheet flexibility,” Haddad said. “More importantly, this transaction represents a significant step toward achieving our longer-term goal of improving overall portfolio quality, focused on ground-up multifamily and urban infill mixed-use development projects, leading to both net asset value growth and future value creation to our shareholders.”

Although the coronavirus pandemic has caused many retailers to suffer, with retailers like J. Crew filing for Chapter 11 protection, grocery-anchored retail centers are performing well. In March, GlobeSt.com reported that the investment class has easily become one of the most popular. Gary Tenzer, co-founding principal at George Smith Partners previously told GlobeSt.com “unanchored centers experience the most distress in downturns as the small service-oriented tenants are typically undercapitalized and often cannot weather downturns.”