"They made a good buy," Bob Buckley, a broker in the Phoenix office of Insigna/ESG who negotiated the sale for the Boston-based REIT, tells GlobeSt.com. "It's one of the strongest parks in the Valley. It's going to have long-term appeal because it's got all the dynamics."
The six buildings in the sale, which were 93% occupied at sale time, are located at 1102 W. Southern Ave., 645 and 849 W. 24th St., and 1219, 1233 and 1245 W. Geneva Dr. The Broadway Business Park is bound by Broadway Road, Southern Avenue, Priest Drive and Mill Avenue. It is positioned within four miles of Sky Harbor International Airport and less than a mile from Interstate 10 and Superstition Freeway. Tempe sits practically in the geographic center of the entire metropolitan area.
The business park usually has an occupancy rate near 97%, but the rate dipped in the last six months, Buckley says. MicroAge Corp., now in bankruptcy, leased thousands of square feet of industrial space in the park and largely is to blame for the vacancy increase, he says. In the past week, MicroAge got $8.5 million in a foreclosure sale of a three-story office building at 1330 W. Southern Ave. in the park.
"The growth of Tempe has produced a favorable market for industrial real estate," says Matt Root, Shidler Group partner. The sale is part of this year's strategy of buying and selling to add another $150 million of western US assets to the portfolio.
Shidler owned the portfolio, constructed between 1979 and 1985, for a little more than two years, during which upgrades were completed and occupancy boosted. The company still owns about 140,000 sf of industrial space in the Valley.
Cabot Industrial Trust is a long-time investor of industrial space in the Valley. The acquisition takes Cabot over the three million-sf mark of Valley holdings in its 1.8 million-sf portfolio that spans 22 US markets. Buckley acted for Shidler Group while Cabot used an in-house broker to negotiate the acquisition.
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