Business

Atlantic General Hospital has a new president and CEO, the Berlin-based health system announced. Donald Owrey comes to Berlin from Pittsburgh, Pa., where he spent the past 20 years in various leadership roles with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, AGH stated in a release. Owrey succeeds Michael Franklin, who left the health system in September last year after 17 years.

Foreign investors are hungry for U.S. multifamily real estate, as one local firm has found. Bethesda’s Excelsa Holding has raised its second equity fund from international investors looking to acquire properties in the United States. It took just three months to raise $154 million, a big upswing from its first, $85.6 million round in 2016. With it, Excelsa is looking largely for multifamily deals in Greater Washington and the Sun Belt, though it is willing to consider a wider range of property types, said Khalil Hibri, head of business development.

Compost Crew wants your old food scraps. The Rockville company has cooked up a plan to expand its food waste recycling service in Greater Washington — starting with $5.5 million in new funding. The goal, said CEO Ben Parry, is “to take composting from a niche market to a mainstream service.”

The Klein Family Harford Crisis Center, a public-private mental health and addiction clinic in Bel Air, was allocated $2 million in this year’s state budget, according to a news release from State Sen. J.B. Jennings. “I am keenly aware of the mental health crisis in Maryland,” wrote Jennings, a Republican who represents District 7, in an Aegis op-ed earlier this month. The center, which opened in 2018, provides resources such as a 24-hour crisis hotline and mobile crisis team, scheduled outpatient services and a walk-in urgent care clinic.

When the University of System Maryland Board of Regents first established a fund to invest in early-stage student-, faculty- and alumni-led companies, they funneled $10 million from the system’s operational balance into it.  The hope was that the fund would become evergreen, with the money made from the investments serving to refill the pot. So far, only one of the Maryland Momentum Fund’s 24 portfolio companies has been acquired: an edtech company focused on K-12 vocabulary, called InferCabulary, that was officially bought in March. The fund’s leaders say this is only an issue of timing — the companies are too young to sell, but exit events are expected to begin in the next few years.

Home sales in Greater Baltimore dipped slightly last month — a year after bidding wars for homes were the norm. The dip, though, did not translate to lower prices as the annual spring selling season starts to ramp up. Data released on Wednesday showed home and condominium sales in Baltimore and its surrounding counties posted a median price of $340,000 in March — a nearly 8% jump from the same month last year. A total of 3,584 residential units changed hands in March, down almost 2% from a year ago, according to data from Rockville-based Bright MLS.

Westfield Annapolis Mall has been put up for sale by its European owners less than four years after it was acquired in a $16 billion deal. Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield SE announced last month that the company is leaving the U.S. as consumers have abandoned shopping malls for online buying during the coronavirus pandemic. The Wall Street Journal first reported the news on April 5. Westfield Annapolis was among dozens other shopping malls in the U.S. and Britain that were acquired in 2017 by Unibail, a Paris-based real estate company.