Atlas Properties Aims for $1B Industrial Portfolio

Sale-leaseback player Atlas Holdings has launched a venture that aims to acquire a $1B industrial portfolio.

The Greenwich, CT-based company announced last week the formation of Atlas Properties, which Atlas said it has established with a consortium of “best-in-class, long term-oriented investors.”

The new venture jumped out to a big head start on its $1B goal. Concurrent with its launch on December 21, 2023, Atlas Properties acquired a diverse portfolio of 23 mission-critical industrial assets across the U.S. for $300M.

Investors in Atlas Properties have committed more than $500M in additional equity capital, which in combination with market debt financing will enable the venture to accumulate $1B in industrial assets in Atlas’ core sectors.

Also launching in December was a new nontraded REIT that will target long-term net lease assets in several sectors, including industrial, healthcare and retail.

The wealth management arm of Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, in an SEC filing, said the new North Haven Net REIT will focus on manufacturing, warehouse, distribution and R&D facilities near major transportation hubs.

In retail, the North Have Net REIT will aim for “e-commerce resistant industries where the presence of a physical locations is important to the end consumer and mission critical to the tenant,” the filing said, adding that the REIT will target assets with a 55% to 60% leverage ratio.

Atlas has specialized in monetizing real estate assets in the sale-leaseback market via one-off transactions. In its new industrial venture, the company said it will leverage its knowledge of industrial credits, property types and underlying mission criticality of assets owned by companies in key Atlas industry sectors.

“Over the last two decades, Atlas has built extensive knowledge of industrial real estate through our businesses that commonly have significant real estate footprints,” said Tim Fazio, Atlas co-founder and managing partner, in a statement.

“The formation of Atlas Properties is a natural progression of our investment strategy and fully consistent with our longstanding practice of investing in areas where our sector expertise and operating experience give us a competitive edge,” Fazio said.

Founded in 2002, Atlas and its affiliates own and operate 27 companies, which employ more than 50,000 associates across 300 facilities worldwide.

Atlas operates in sectors including automotive, building materials, capital equipment, construction services, food manufacturing and distribution, metals processing, packaging, paper, power generation, printing, pulp, supply chain management and wood products. Atlas’ companies together generate approximately $16B in revenues annually.

Transaction volumes plunged across all CRE asset sectors in 2023 thanks primarily to high interest rates, and industrial was no exception. Through the end of November, there were slightly less than $49B in industrial sales, less than half of the $101B that closed in 2022, according to CommercialEdge.