2000: TJ Maxx DC Brings Epic Investment to Philly Area

Metro Philadelphia got more than 1,100 new jobs thanks to a 20-year lease between the TJX Cos. and Liberty Property Trust. The REIT developed a new 1.02-million-square-foot distribution center for the T.J. Maxx division of tenant on a 67-acre parcel adjacent to the Northeast Philadelphia Airport. The project cost was anticipated to be approximately $61.5 million, of which approximately $49 million was private-sector funds. The distribution center was built on a land owned by the City of Philadelphia and leased by the Philadelphia Authority for Industrial Development, located within a designated Keystone Opportunity Zone. The deal represented one of the largest infusions of new private sector employment in the City of Philadelphia in more than 20 years.

2001: Kellogg's Lined Up For 1MSF BTS

Lower land costs played a major role in Catellus Development Corp.'s decision to locate a 1-million-sf build-to-suit for Kellogg's Corp. in the Chicago suburb of Minooka, IL. FCL Builders will construct the industrial facility, which was leased for 12 years. Located at the Upper Midwest Distribution Center at Internationale Centre South, a new 387-acre business park. READ MORE HERE

2002: Hillwood Turns Over Keys to 756,000 SF

Ryder Integrated Logistics Inc. and Philips Consumer Electronics North America took over the largest building completed in three years in Alliance/Texas, a Hillwood Properties property. The 756,000-sf structure is located at 300 Freedom Dr. in the Roanoke section of the multi-municipality, 15,000-acre AllianceTexas. Ryder Integrated Logistics will manage Philips' product distribution from the center. The site pushes Ryder's leased interests in AllianceTexas to 1.2 million sf. It also leases 42,000 sf for a North American Transportation Management Center; 176,000 sf for an e-solutions distribution center; and 192,037 sf for a Hewlett Packard distribution center. The Ryder/Philips lease represents the second-largest lease ever signed in AllianceTexas.

2003: Paper Company Signs Leases for 1.2M SF

In three separate transactions, Sappi Fine Paper North America has signed leases for a total of just over 1.2 million sf of industrial space in New Jersey. The key deal is a 500,000-sf build-to-suit in the Middlesex County community of South Brunswick, said to be among the largest such projects in the Garden State in 2003. The build-to-suit project will rise at the new 1.25-million-sf Heller Industrial Park and used for manufacturing, warehousing and distribution purposes. At 100-120 Industrial Ave. in Edison, NJ, meanwhile, the company renegotiated an existing lease encompassing 220,000 sf of distribution space, which Sappi will use only until the new build-to-suit facility in South Brunswick is ready for occupancy. And at 100 Liberty Way in Cranbury, NJ, the company inked a new short-term lease for 575,000 sf within Sudler Management Co.'s Corporate Park Cranbury. Sappi will close and relocate its Allentown, PA distribution facility to the site. All three transactions were arranged for Sappi by Trammell Crow Co.

2004: Williams-Sonoma Takes a Seat in Garden State

Williams-Sonoma signed a 781,000-sf lease for a Keystone Property Trust industrial building off exit 8A. Staubach handled the deal for the retailer, which was on a very tight schedule and therefore needed existing space. After looking at a dozen and a half properties in five states, the firm decided on the property at 257 Prospect Plains Rd., which had recently been leased to another tenant. Williams-Sonoma's Logistics Distribution and Corporate Facilities Team and Staubach's Corporate Services, Municipal Incentives, Logistics and Industrial Practice Groups negotiated the lease for the retailer's first East Coast distribution center.

2005: Home Depot Signs Estimated $25M Distribution Lease

In the largest distribution center lease signed in 2005 in Georgia, Atlanta-based Home Depot Inc. is taking a total one million sf in two phases at ProLogis Park Greenwood, about 15 miles south of Downtown Atlanta. At the time the deal closed, market experts estimated length of the lease at 10 years at an estimated aggregate rent of $25 million. Home Depot is leasing 678,000 sf in the park's expansion phase being completed and 330,000 sf of existing contiguous space at the property. Home Depot is also renewing an 812,739-sf lease in New Jersey.

2006: Kimberly Clark Inks Huge Deal in Atlanta

The biggest industrial/distribution transaction of the year, Kimberly Clark took a 1.3-million-square-foot spec building at Oakmont Industrial Group's SouthPort Logistics Center in Henry County. Colliers Spectrum Cauble represented the tenant, while CB Richard Ellis acted for the landlord. Oakmont started the building as a 921,600-square-foot spec project, but the building is expandable to nearly 1.6 million square feet and also offers 248 trailer spaces. A few months after this lease, Kimberly-Clark decided to expand its occupancy at the park to a total of 1.638 million sf.

2007: With 1.7-MSF Deal, Whirlpool Fills US' Largest Speculative Facility

When Whirlpool Corp. set out to consolidate its Inland Empire operations into one facility three years ago, its broker, Jones Lang LaSalle, was faced with the daunting task of finding a huge amount of space in a very tight market. So tight, in fact, that the team originally considered buying land on which to built a facility. That effort petered out after the firm was unable to find a shovel-ready site of adequate size. In November, the firms zeroed in on the Perris Distribution Center, a 1.7-million-sf asset IDS Real Estate Group was building on a speculative basis. Cushman & Wakefield Inc. spoke for IDS in the deal. Located on 80 acres at 3691 Perris Blvd. in Perris, CA, work on the facility began in 2005. It is believed to be the largest single industrial structure ever built on spec, and amounts to the equivalent of about 31 football fields. Whirlpool will use the facility to house its southwest regional distribution operations.

2008: Amazon Inks Indiana's Largest Leases

Amazon made a big splash in Indiana in 2008 when it inked deals for two industrial facilities. In April, it signed on for 630,573 sf in Building 1 at Allpoints at Anson in Whitestown, a speculative facility started in 2007 and completed in June by Browning/Duke LLC. The 10-year, $20-million deal, expected to create 1,200 new jobs in the submarket, is said to be the second-largest industrial lease signed last year in the state. In August, Amazon agreed to take the 947,333-sf facility at 715 Airtech Pkwy. within Browning/ProLogis' AirTech Park in Plainfield. The retailer, which is expected to add 350 jobs to Plainfield, is receiving performance-based tax credits and training grants from the Indiana Economic Development Corp. Cushman & Wakefield and Summit Realty represented Amazon in both transactions.

2009: Williams-Sonoma Leases 1.4M-SF Warehouse

San Francisco-based retail giant Williams-Sonoma struck again in New Jersey, this time picking up 1.35 million square feet at IDI-developed Middlesex Center, located at 340 Middlesex Dr. in South Brunswick. Williams-Sonoma will use the space as a distribution center to serve both its northeastern markets and international operations. The company is consolidating various distribution sites in the eastern US into this one facility. Middlesex I, which will be fully occupied by the new tenant, represents the first completed building at Middlesex Center, which is planned to offer 2.5 million square feet in three buildings. The park is located at Exit 8A of the New Jersey Turnpike.

2010: Navistar Leases Space in Cherry Hill Business Park

Navistar International Corp. is moving its distribution operation to Joliet from West Chicago. The truckmaker has inked a lease for 13 years for a building measuring 860,100 square feet in the Cherry Hill Business Park. Northern Builders Inc. will expand the building to accommodate the truckmaker. Navistar occupied 566,000 square feet of space in two side-by-side buildings in West Chicago. Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. represented the tenant in the transaction.

2011: Restoration Hardware Inks 1.2M-Square-Foot Industrial Lease

Weeks Robinson Properties, an Atlanta-based firm that has been pushing into the Mid-Atlantic's industrial market, scored a coup of a lease with Restoration Hardware. The retailer has inked a 1.2-million-square foot, 15-year lease at Trade Center 95 in Cecil County, near Baltimore. The facility will serve as Restoration Hardware's East Coast furniture distribution center. The tenant will fill an existing 600,000-square-foot building, and an additional 600,000 square feet delivered mid-2012.

2012: Amazon Commits to 3.3M SF in TX, NJ

North Texas may have seen its share of big office deals, but the market's industrial activity didn't disappoint, either. Amazon.com signed two major leases there last year, taking 67 acres at AllianceTexas for a new 1.1-million-square-foot regional distribution center, and a facility of the same size in Coppell, TX. Hillwood Development Co. owns the 17,000-acre AllianceTexas project in Haslet. The Coppell site, where Amazon's 15-year lease has a targeted start date of Aug. 17, 2013, is owned by a partnership affiliated with Hillwood. Around the same time, the retailer signed on for another million-square-foot fulfillment center in the Matrix Business Park in Robbinsville, NJ, again representing an investment of $200 million. In fact, the New Jersey Governor's Office has reported that Amazon has pledged to open two such facilities in the state, hiring 1,500 workers, an collecting a 7% sales tax for sales to local customers this summer, generating about $30 million in tax revenue annually. KTR Capital Partners of New York City is building the deal through a separate entity named KTR NJ Urban Renewal LLC, in order to benefit from a 20-year, $13.76-million PILOT program offered by the Robbinsville Township Council.

2013: Fort Worth Gets Industrious

A pair of warehouse deals accounted for approximately two million square feet of industrial space at Hillwood Properties' 18,000-acre AllianceTexas master-planned community north of Fort Worth. LG Electronics USA Inc., the North American subsidiary of Korean-based LG Electronics Inc. and already a tenant within the Alliance development, said in October it would vacate a pair of distribution facilities totaling 950,000 square feet for a newly-constructed space of 1.2 million square feet, which was announced as speculative construction the previous March. The North Texas distribution hub is LG Electronics' largest single distribution point in the United States, largely in part to the region's proximity to factories in Mexico.

2013: IE's Logistics Evolution Advances

Panattoni Development Co.'s build-to-suit transaction at 16110 Cosmos St. in Moreno Valley, CA for a Fortune 30 company—which market reports identified as Procter & Gamble—marked another milestone in the evolution of the Inland Empire as perhaps the nation's primary international logistics hub. The largest industrial lease signed in Southern California in 2013 at nearly 1.5 million square feet, the deal is valued at more than $120 million. The property itself is nearly half a mile in length, and was completed on an expedited 10-month timeline including all required federal, state and local jurisdictional approvals. For the tenant, the facility will be an integral component of its logistics and distribution infrastructure and will ultimately service the western US.

2014: Two States, Three Major Leases

A two-state combination of leasing and build-to-suit development in which a 570,000-square-foot lease was the smallest component, Georgia-Pacific's 2014 expansion and consolidation was among the biggest deals the industrial sector has seen in some time. The building materials and consumer products firm worked with Hillwood on a 1.6-million-square-foot distribution center south of Dallas, and with ProLogis for 1.5 million square feet of distribution space along the I-81 corridor in Pennsylvania's Cumberland County.

'First up was the Atlanta-based company's agreement to lease the facility Hillwood planned to build at 1000 E. Cleveland Rd. in Hutchins, TX, east of I-45 and south of I-20. In 2013 the developer had gotten approvals, and an 85%, 10-year tax abatement, to build on 83 acres just north of where Panattoni Development Co. had begun work on a 1.4-million-square-foot facility for Procter & Gamble. The Hutchins BTS would represent a consolidation from G-P's distribution center in Mesquite, TX and elsewhere.

The Cumberland Area Economic Development Corp. lobbied for G-P to choose ProLogis Park 81 in Shippensburg to build its second facility in Pennsylvania, joining an existing distribution center in the Bucks County community of Quakertown, near Philadelphia. Meanwhile, the Franklin County Area Economic Development Park wanted the company to select the United Business Park in Southampton Township, Franklin County. The Shippensburg site won out, with G-P committing to 1.5 million square feet at 234 Walnut Bottom Rd. While that's under construction, G-P signed a short-term, 570,000-square-foot lease with KTR Capital Partners at 950 Centerville Rd. in Newville, PA, where it will remain until the ProLogis build is completed. G-P's deals with ProLogis and KTR represented 43% of the total square footage of new industrial leases signed in Central Pennsylvania during the third quarter, according to Cushman & Wakefield.

2014: P&G's Supply Chain Transformation

Even amid a flurry of big-box industrial development, Procter & Gamble's four-state, four-region expansion—four deals all told, each one well north of one million square feet—stood out. The largest of the four, a 1.8-million-square-foot distribution center at the Global Logistics Air Park in Union, OH, will be “part of a significant supply chain transformation” for P&G, the company's Yannis Skoufalos said last May. In fact, the $89-million facility near Dayton International Airport began construction in the fall of 2013, but Cincinnati-based P&G only announced its tenancy six months into the project. Prologis delivered the build-to-suit in the fourth quarter of 2014, and subsequently sold it to Cole Capital, a division of American Realty Capital Properties, for $85.7 million.

Liberty Property Trust had first acquired 183 acres in Shippensburg, PA, along the I-81 industrial corridor of south central Pennsylvania, with the idea of building two facilities of one million square feet each. Representatives of P&G approached the REIT about building the consumer products giant a single, 1.7-million-square-foot DC instead, and the township approved the redesign in April 2013. When it opened at 9300 Old Scotland Rd. in the third quarter of last year, it brought nearly 1,000 new jobs to the Shippensburg area.

A joint venture of Panattoni Development Co. and CalSTRS, which partnered to develop warehouse facilities across the US, in 2014 completed a 1.5-million-square-foot BTS for P&G at the Inland Empire Global Logistics Center in Moreno Valley, CA. “It was the fifth-largest building ever built in the state of California,” Panattoni partner Steve Batcheller told GlobeSt.com, sister publication to Real Estate Forum. “We were awarded in 2014 the 2013 developer of the year award and the lease of the year award for it from NAIOP.” Representing P&G in the deal were Peter McWilliams and Mike McCrary of JLL.

From the same owner/developer team as the Inland Empire DC came a 1.4-million-square-foot facility for P&G at 1500 S. Millers Ferry Rd. in Wilmer, TX. The DC is located on 76 acres within the master-planned DalPort Trade Center, just across the road from a 1.1-million-square-foot regional hub occupied by Whirpool Corp. In September, word came out that P&G had leased the entire facility, on which construction had begun the previous fall. The deal was arranged by JLL.

2014: Michelin Puts RidgePort On the Map

Thirty football fields can hold an awful lot of tires. That's roughly the expanse that will be covered by Michelin North America's distribution center now under way at the RidgePort Logistics Center in Wilmington, IL. In May, the tire manufacturer signed a build-to-suit agreement with Ridge Development, the industrial arm of Transwestern Development Co., for 1.7 million square feet at RidgePort. The three-building BTS on 140 acres was the largest US industrial development to break ground in 2014. Michelin has the option to add another one million square feet on 41 acres. With room to build up to 14 million square feet of industrial, warehouse and logistics facilities, RidgePort is owned by an affiliate of Prudential Insurance Co. The Michelin facilities will be owned by a joint venture of Ridge Development and a Heitman Financial-advised state pension fund. JLL represented ownership, while CBRE represented Michelin.

2014: Walmart Ramps Up E-Commerce Platform

For an illustration on the grand scale of the impact e-commerce is making on the industrial sector—and on brick-and-mortar retailers—look no further than Walmart's quartet of e-commerce distribution center leases in 2014. Totaling 4.8 million square feet, three of the build-to-suit deals were with the same developer, Majestic Realty.

The first of the four leases to be announced, though, was under the aegis of a different development team: a joint venture of Browning and Duke Realty. In June, the partnership announced that Walmart had selected it for a 1.2-million-square-foot BTS at AllPoints Midwest, an industrial campus the JV is developing in the Indianapolis suburb of Plainfield, IN. Thanks in part to the JV's foresight in constructing a speculative building pad the year prior, it was able to meet Walmart's requirement to have a DC completed by the end of 2014. Walmart was represented in lease negotiations by JLL.

Majestic's trio of Walmart deals began in early October, with a prelease of the entire 1.45-million-square-foot Building 1 at the developer's Majestic Chino Gateway project in the Inland Empire community of Chino, CA. The Walmart lease accounts for nearly half of what will be 3.1 million square feet of industrial space when Majestic Chino is fully built out. A September 2015 completion is expected for Building 1. On Oct. 15, Pennsylvania state officials announced that Majestic would build Walmart a 1.2-million-square-foot e-commerce fulfillment center at Majestic Bethlehem Center in Bethlehem, PA. The Bentonville, AR-based retailing giant had previously announced it would open a one-million-square-foot DC at Lehigh Valley Park Industrial Park VII, also in Bethlehem.

The day after Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett announced his state's Walmart/Majestic Realty deal, Corbett's counterpart in Georgia, Gov. Nathan Deal, had similar news, although Atlanta's development community had known about it for weeks in advance. Deal's office said that Walmart would locate a 1.2-million-square-foot e-commerce DC at the Majestic Airport Center IV industrial park in Union City, GA. Walmart is slated to invest more than $108 million in project over the next three years, according to Deal's office.