Industrial Investment Running at Full Steam This Year

Industrial investment activity came roaring back at the end of the year, with November and December both marked by a number of very significant industrial deals. The calendar pages may have turned to a new year, but investors haven’t pulled off the gas. They have continued to buy up major industrial portfolios and assets in early 2021.

The latest: Preylock Holdings’ acquisition of a three property distribution portfolio in Atlanta and Memphis totaling 2.2 million square feet. The firm acquired the class-A portfolio from Core5 Industrial Partners for $166.7 million. The portfolio consists of the 1-million-square foot Crossroads Business Center, and two buildings that are part of the DeSoto 55 Logistics Center totaling nearly 1.2 million square feet. All three properties were completed in 2020 and are proximate to airports and intermodal hubs, and have state-of-the-art features. Dennis Mitchell, Matt Wirth, Britton Burdette, Jim Freeman and Mitchell Townsend of JLL Capital Markets team represented Core5 Industrial Partners in the deal.

In another transaction, CRG sold the The Cubes at DuPont, a 1.6 million-square-foot asset in Seattle for a staggering $221 million to Duke Realty. The property was built in 2018 as part of CRG’s build-to-core fund. The three-property asset includes a 747,488-square-foot speculative warehouse that was fully leased to Kimberly-Clark in 2019; a redeveloped 340,000-square-foot building; and a 494,900-square-foot speculative warehouse that is available for immediate occupancy.

Alex. Brown Realty sold a 1.3 million-square-foot, six-property industrial portfolio to Platform Ventures for an undisclosed amount. The properties were located in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and were 100% occupied at the time of the sale. A team of brokers located in Collier’s International’s Minnesota office brokered the deal.

On the West Coast, REIT Rexford Industrial acquired five industrial properties in Southern California for $72.2 million. The assets, which were individual transactions, include three existing properties and two development sites, a 2.5-acre industrial outdoor storage site and a 5.6-acre redevelopment site. These deals bring Rexford’s 2021 acquisition total to $95 million, illustrating the aggressive buying activity this year.

This activity comes on the heels of several significant transaction to close at the end of 2021, including KKR’s purchase of a 9.7 million-square-foot industrial portfolio for $835 million. The purchase grew the firm’s holdings by nearly one-third, giving KKR a total of 30 million square feet in industrial assets. The end of the year also saw strong fundraising activity. LPC Logistics, for example, closed its Venture One industrial-to-core fund with $1 billion in capital commitments. The fund will focus on developing ground-up industrial properties in the US.