A 328,000-square-foot retail shopping center in Springfield has sold for $31 million.

Connecticut-based Urstadt Biddle Properties Inc. sold the Five Town Plaza Shopping Center to an institutional real estate company for an all-cash price of $31 million. Urstadt Biddle had owned the shopping center since the 1970s.

The sale of Five Town Plaza will complete a tax-deferred reverse exchange, the down-leg of which was the purchase of two retail properties in Greenwich, Conn., for $47.4 million. The company will use the proceeds of the sale to repay existing borrowings on its unsecured revolving credit facility that were made in connection with the purchase of the Greenwich properties. Urstadt Biddle estimates that it will record, for financial reporting purposes, a gain on sale of the property of approximately $24 million in its fiscal fourth quarter ending Oct. 31.

"Our company was able to reinvest the proceeds of the sale into two primarily retail properties located in Greenwich. One property is a CVS-anchored 48,000-square-foot property located on the Boston Post Road (Route 1) in the Cos Cob section of Greenwich and the other is a 40,000-square-foot property anchored by a Kings Supermarket, located adjacent to the train station in the Old Greenwich section of Greenwich," Willing L. Biddle, Urstadt Biddle Properties’ president and CEO said in a statement. "We believe that the long-term growth prospects of exceptionally well located grocery and drug store anchored properties in Greenwich will be superior to that of a legacy property in Springfield, and thus we took the opportunity to pare and upgrade our portfolio."