SoCal Cold Storage Warehouse Doubles Price in 7 Months
Thor Equities pays $85M for 158K SF facility leased to Anheuser-Busch that traded for $36M in January.
Just when you thought sale prices for industrial properties in SoCal couldn’t get any higher comes an eye-opening $535-per-square-foot deal on a cold-storage warehouse that the seller bought for less than half of that amount in January.
Thor Equities and PFA, a Danish pension fund, have acquired for $85M a 158,800 SF industrial property leased to Anheuser-Busch in Santa Fe Springs, a suburb of Los Angeles. The sellers, Staley Point Capital and Bain Capital, acquired the $36M asset in January with a loan from Mesa West Capital.
The deal for the 8.7-acre property tops the $481-per-square-foot price KKR said this week it paid for a 281K SF warehouse in Eastvale in the Inland Empire market.
The Budweiser warehouse complex is in the Mid-Counties submarket, which straddles LA and Orange counties, in proximity to the 5 and 605 Freeways. The property includes two buildings, 16 exterior docks and excess land for fleet and trailer parking,
The acquisition is the latest addition to a global industrial portfolio that the partnership of Thor Equities and PFA, known as the Thor PFA Industrial Fund and Thor PFA European Mixed-Use Fund, have acquired since 2016.
Last week, the partners acquired an 11-property industrial portfolio in Savannah for $49M encompassing 524K SF on 27 acres in the SPA Industrial Park. Thor, which specializes in acquiring assets in top-tier infill locations, has rapidly expanded its footprint in Georgia since it broke into the market late last year.
The partners are developing a new 1M SF warehouse in Adairsville, GA. Their industrial portfolio also includes assets in NJ, Chicago, Dallas and Philadelphia.
The industrial markets in Southern California are the tightest in the US, and none is tighter than the Inland Empire. According to JLL’s Q2 2022 industrial market report for Inland Empire, asking rates increased another 13.7 percent in Q2 while vacancies dipped to a microscopic 0.4%.
JLL’s report said leasing activity in Inland Empire has slowed considerably due to the lack of available space to lease; pre-leased space was the primary driver of net absorption during Q2 as existing availabilities remain extremely limited, GlobeSt.com reported.
The lack of available space has driven a record amount of new warehouse construction in Inland Empire. During Q2, another 9.2M Sf was added to the development pipeline, which now totals nearly 40M SF.