Cross Roads Centers, a New Orleans-based third-party logistics provider, took the entire 600,000-sf Plainfield Building Three in the Plainfield Business Center off of Stafford Road, Hosfeld says. The 5-year-old building had been occupied by Bombay Furniture and Pepsico. However, Bombay went out of business and vacated the building in January, and Pepsico consolidated into another building, he says. The building has 36-foot clear heights, more than 50 dock doors and extra-wide column and bay spacing. "We were left by the end of June with a vacant building, but within 30 days we had the building fully leased again. That's very unusual, typically you'll get six-to-12 months of downtime on a building this size," Hosfeld says. The lease rate in the area is about $3.25 to $3.50 per sf, he says.

He says the lease brings the company's nine-building park, at 3.7 million sf, to 100% occupied. Hosfeld says he believes the market demand now is high, even with the struggling economy. "We've had absorption of almost three million sf already this year, that compares to 800,000 sf throughout all of 2007," he says.

Also on Friday, Duke announced that it is building the new facility at Allpoints Midwest, a spec building that will be expandable to up to 1.1 million sf. The project should be complete for the fourth quarter, say company officials. The new building follows a lease at the park in January by Prime Distribution Services Inc. for another new building. The Prime Distribution facility was completed in 2007 at 646,380 sf, but the company asked to expand that building to 1.2 million sf when it signed the lease. The Allpoints park encompasses 920 acres near a new stretch of the Ronald Reagan highway, and is a joint venture of Duke and Browning Investments. The property will have about 12.5 million sf of bulk warehouse when all built out, said Duke officials.