ELWOOD, IL-Liberty Property Trust has purchased two industrial buildings in the 2,000-acre CenterPoint Intermodal Center here, a total of 1.2 million square feet, for $60 million from Sydney, Australia-based Mirvac Industrial Trust. The move allows the Malvern, PA-based Liberty, which already has 6.3 million square feet of industrial property in the Chicago area, to jump into the region’s intermodal operations.
The properties include the one-million-square-foot distribution center at 21705 Mississippi St. and the 213,500-square-foot facility at 27413 S. Baseline Rd. The properties are about 50% leased each. DSC Corp. leases at the Mississippi Street facility, and NFI is taking half of the other building.
Don Schoenheider, VP and city manager at Liberty, says the company shouldn’t have a problem leasing up the two facilities. Each building is adjacent to the 770-acre BNSF Logistics Park-Chicago complex that opened in 2002. The intermodal complex was built with direct access to BNSF’s rail routes, primarily from the West Coast.
“Companies can see a significant cost savings from using intermodal systems. Companies are importing a high quantity of goods from the Los Angeles/Long Beach port, coming from Asia, and firms can move product into the Midwest more efficiently using rail. This intermodal is the biggest inland port location in the country,” Schoenheider tells GlobeSt.com.
He says the Central Will industrial submarket, unlike the rest of the flat markets in the Chicago area, is starting to see very strong demand. Multiple users of over 500,000 square feet have signed for space. However, Schoenheider admits Liberty’s own planned 3.5-million-square-foot distribution park on 255 acres in nearby Minooka, IL still hasn’t gotten off the ground. “It’s been on hold,” he says. “It’s at the intersection of Interstates 80 and 55, we think it will be a great logistics park, but the economy has kept everyone from building in the past couple years.”
The CenterPoint park includes 12 million square feet. The main tenants include Walmart, DSC Logistics, Georgia Pacific, Sanyo Logistics and Maersk Logistics.
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