Affinius Capital originated an $82.3 million loan to finance the ground-up development of Eastport Logistics Park, a to-be-built four-building industrial development in Jacksonville, FL, totaling 890,000 square feet. The loan was provided to a joint venture between InLight Real Estate Partners and an Ares Management Real Estate fund and will be used for the construction and lease-up of the project. 

Eastport Logistics Park will feature four buildings with 32’-36’ clear heights, 135’-185’ truck court depths, 222 dock doors, 418 trailer parking stalls, and 691 car parking spaces. Located just off I-295, five miles from the I-95 interchange and four miles from the Port of Jacksonville, the development will offer seamless connectivity to the broader Jacksonville market and major East Coast port markets, with access to 98 million consumers within a one-day drive. Its location serves the area’s growing e-commerce, logistics, and distribution needs while offering access to adequate labor pools. 

Colliers facilitated the $61.8 million sale of POLYWOOD’s 930,250-square-foot manufacturing and warehousing campus in Person County, North Carolina. Colliers’s Jimmy Ullrich, Ryan Vaught, Michael Macchia and Riley Vaught represented the sellers, Weston and Blue Vista Capital Management. Carolina Logistics Center and Tratt Properties were the buyers.

The facility will continue to serve as both a manufacturing facility and a distribution center for POLYWOOD, an outdoor furniture company. This will allow the company to continue shipping its products to customers along the East Coast.

Located at 3300 Jim Thorpe Hwy, the site is composed of two buildings, including one that is the original 430,256 square foot building utilized to extrude, manufacture, package, and distribute the POLYWOOD product. The second building is a newly completed build-to-suit 500,000-square foot facility, completing POLYWOOD’s final assembly and shipping. It features a 100,000-sq.-ft. recycling area, a 200,000-square-foot foot extrusion area, and a 200,000-square-foot finished goods area.

The project is located 30 miles north of Raleigh-Durham.

 JLL Capital Markets closed the sale of 2 Hilton Ct., a 10.41-acre site, which will be redeveloped into a 123,000-square-foot warehouse in Parsippany, NJ by the purchaser, Link Logistics. Terms were not disclosed.

A JLL team led by senior managing directors Marc Duval and Jose Cruz, along with managing director Jordan Avanzato and directors Nicholas Stefans and Jason Lundy, worked on behalf of the seller, 2 Hilton Court LLC.

“The industrial market in northern New Jersey has been a strong performer despite the headwinds over the past few years and the quality locations that offer accessibility and labor remain a top choice for developers,” said Duval.

2 Hilton Ct. is located near the major I-80 and I-287 interchange in Morris County within the SED-10 zone, one of the specialized economic development districts in Parsippany. The site offers convenient access to major thoroughfares and is located less than 60 miles from three major international airports.

CBRE has facilitated a $61.3 million loan for Florida Gateway Logistics Park – Building 800, a fully leased and newly built 1 million-square-foot warehouse in Jacksonville, Florida.

Brian Linnihan, Mike Ryan, Richard Henry, and Taylor Crowder with CBRE Capital Markets’ Debt & Structured Finance in Atlanta represented the borrower, Dallas-based Hillwood Investment Properties. The loan was secured through KKR.

Located at 9909 Pritchard Rd. in Jacksonville, the 1 million-square-foot warehouse sits on approximately 52 acres, was completed in 2023, and is fully leased to a single third-party logistics company. The building features 40-foot clear heights, cross-dock loading, 290 trailer spaces and 511 auto parking spots. It is part of the broader Florida Gateway Logistics Park, which, at full buildout, is expected to include 3.1 million square feet of industrial space across seven buildings. 

Specializing in distribution centers, e-commerce facilities, and logistics centers, Hillwood develops and acquires properties for industrial and logistics customers. 

Trinity Capital Advisors and Nuveen Real Estate have unloaded Alexander Commerce Park, a three-building, 441,072-square-foot logistics portfolio in Raleigh-Durham’s Research Triangle Park. The property sold for $80.2 million. The park, delivered in 2023, is 100% occupied by four tenants, including Upper Deck, Wolfspeed, Wesco, and Running Logistics. Prologis was the buyer.

Trinity has been busy in the Triangle region. Over the past 10 years, the firm has acquired or developed over 9.0 million square feet of office, industrial, and life science assets totaling $2.2 billion in capitalization. Major projects include Eastgate 540 (980,000 square feet across six industrial buildings), 147 Exchange (274,370 square foot industrial building), Park Point (645,000 square foot adaptive reuse life science park), Spark LS (1.7 million square foot life science campus), and Southport Innovation Center (911,000 square foot life science/flex manufacturing campus).

Pete Pittroff, Dave Andrews, and Zachary Lloyd led the JLL Investment Sales and Advisory team representing the seller.

JLL has represented Link Logistics, a leading operator of last-mile logistics real estate, in the acquisition of a 28,032-square-foot industrial warehouse facility in the O’Hare submarket. The property is located at 2710 United Lane in Elk Grove Village, Illinois.

Dominic Carbonari, JLL Senior Managing Director, and Kate Coxworth, JLL Executive Vice President, represented Link Logistics in the sale and are leading the leasing of the facility. Link Logistics acquired the 4.6-acre site, which features a two-year-old Class A warehouse facility with a 24-foot clear height and over 80 trailer parking spaces.

The property also features 12 exterior docking positions with 40,000-pound levelers and parking for employees and guests. “This facility’s location provides superb access to the entire Chicago metropolitan area and links to the nation’s transportation infrastructure via rail, roads and airports,” said Carbonari.

JLL’s Q1 2024 JLL Industrial Outlook Report noted increased Chicago market demand by construction and building materials industries for warehouse space, with these industries capturing 18% of all Q1 2024 industrial leasing volume.

PREMIER Design + Build Group has completed work on Phase II of the Rickenbacker Logistics Park project in Columbus. OH. The completion adds more than two million square feet of industrial space for client CT Realty, or nearly twice as much as the project’s first phase.

“The Rickenbacker Logistics Park is nothing less than a best-in-class campus,” said Ryan Keefe, Premier’s EVP, Midwest. “It’s designed and built to deliver what today’s users need to thrive, and it’s located in a geographic region that’s seeing exponential growth. As we complete each phase, we see the enormous demand for these spaces that facilitate business success for users.”

The Premier team included program manager Samantha Skopek, project manager Dan Freitag and superintendent Thomas Sterbenz. The team recently began work on Phase III of the project, which will add a 773,000-square-foot building to the campus. When complete, Rickenbacker Logistics Park will total four million square feet across six buildings.

Don’t miss the Lifetime Achievement Award Presentation and Keynote Interview with G. Joseph Cosenza, Vice Chairman of The Inland Real Estate Group, LLC and President of Inland Real Estate Acquisitions, LLC at Connect Midwest: Multifamily, Affordable, Student & Senior Housing Trends on June 4, 2024, at the W-Chicago, City Center Hotel, Chicago, IL. Register Today to network with your peers!

Capital Development Partners has announced a 982,800-square-foot lease at Central Port Logistics Center with Plastic Express. Plastic Express will export over 150 million tons of US-made plastic resin products.

Central Port Logistics Center Building 11 is a CSX rail-served site and will deliver in June of 2024. This facility offers packaging, warehousing, transloading, and storage capacity for over 8,000 TEUs (Twenty Foot Equivalent Units) and will create over 200 direct jobs and 250 construction jobs. Building 11 is Phase I of the industrial park that covers 1,000 acres with 5.5 million square feet of warehouse space to support the growth of the Georgia Ports Authority. The logistics center is a $155 million project. Central Port Logistics Center Building 11 will not be ready until June of 2024.

Plastic Express manages over 50 rail yards, 4.2 million square feet of full-service warehouses with packaging and over 30 bulk truck terminals across the country. 

AltaBird Investments and Stonemont Financial Group have completed the Brown Thrasher Logistics Center. Located within the Belfast Commerce Park in the Savannah Metropolitan Area, the new development is comprised of 281,067 square feet of speculative, Class A industrial space.

“The Brown Thrasher Logistics Center is one of the many industrial centers that were expected to come online this year in Savannah’s booming industrial market,” said Altabird Principal and CEO Brendan Mason. “With its prime location close to the Port of Savannah, one of the busiest container gateways in the U.S., this development is poised to add remarkable value to the region.”

In addition to AltaBird Investments and Stonemont Financial Group, the Brown Thrasher Logistics Center project team consists of:

·         Hussey Gay Bell (Architecture and Civil Engineering)

·         Evans General Contractors (Construction)

·         Bill Sparks and Preston Andrews – CBRE (Leasing)

·         Trey Barry – CBRE (Capital Markets)

Industrial developers are going the extra mile to fortify facilities as a confluence of population growth across Middle America and the rise of severe weather events outside of the region known as Tornado Alley puts more warehouses in the path of destruction.

Twenty-seven of North America’s top 100 logistics companies are headquartered in the Midwest, home to several states that fall into Tornado Alley, according to a 2023 report by Transport Topics. But increasingly severe weather ripping through other parts of the country is expanding the definition of which states fall under that umbrella, while population shifts mean more facilities are moving into danger zones.

“Manufacturing, warehouse and logistics folks are going to go where the population goes,” said Kathy Fulton, executive director of the American Logistics Aid Network. “If we are building in places we’ve never built before because people are moving to places they’ve never lived before, then there are hazards that we’re going to have to deal with that we’ve never dealt with before.”

Much of the influx of industrial activity in the region can be linked to pandemic-induced migration patterns, which saw many Americans moving out of large cities and into less populous areas. Industrial demand surged in the Midwest during the health crisis, with a 2021 JLL report projecting the region would need 275M SF of new warehouse space by 2026 to meet demand.

Kansas, for one, landed 21 distribution warehouse or logistics plants in 2022, according to the state’s Department of Commerce, including everything from a $1M investment by Fridgetek to a $326M investment by Heartland Coca-Cola Bottling Co.

“We’re seeing more [severe weather] events, and we’re seeing them in areas we never had warehouses before,” Fulton said. “This propagation of warehouse space over the last decade has put those buildings in areas where tornadoes may have occurred in the past, but they never affected anybody because it was just land.”

At the same time, pro-business policies as well as the availability of land, labor and power in cities like Atlanta, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee, have generated more manufacturing activity in the Southeast, which is home to 28 of the top 100 logistics firms, per Transport Topics. 

And while tornado risk has historically been low in the region, a growing body of research suggests that is no longer the case.

States like Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi have experienced an increase in tornado touchdowns each year, an April report by Insider found, and researchers warn the storms could become more severe and begin to devastate a greater swath of the U.S.

“There does appear to be a shift [in tornadoes] toward the Southeast,” said Jessica Waters, vice president and manager of climate and structural resilience for commercial property insurer FM Global. “It’s something the science community is keeping an eye on, and it’s something that FM Global is certainly keeping an eye on so we can be in a better position to help protect our clients.”

A series of deadly tornadoes swept through southeast Missouri, southern Kentucky, Tennessee and central Alabama in March 2020. The worst of the storms occurred in Middle Tennessee, resulting in widespread damage, hundreds of injuries and more than two dozen deaths, according to the National Weather Service.

More than 400 commercial structures were damaged or destroyed in Nashville, according to CNBC. The impact was especially acute given the exponential population and corporate growth that had occurred there over the preceding decade, driven by companies like Alphabet and Amazon opening up hubs and creating thousands of jobs.

Tornadoes happen with little notice, which makes preparation difficult, said Richard Thompson, international director and leader of supply chain and logistics solutions for JLL. Many companies will shy away from Tornado Alley, he said, but those that choose to go there usually spend extra money on strengthening facilities.

“The holy grail of the supply chain is trying to predict the unpredictable, and tornadoes are the ultimate in natural disasters that are extremely difficult to predict and understand,” he said. “If you can’t stay away, then there are some building designs that are advantageous.”

Choosing the right construction materials is critical to protecting facilities against tornadoes, Waters said. Opting for a concrete roof over metal, or avoiding materials that could become projectiles in severe wind, are some of the things developers in Tornado Alley have to consider.

Those choices, she said, often translate to a heftier bottom line.

“There would be an increase in cost because you are designing the building to be more robust, you’re using heavier construction materials,” she said. “That comes into balancing the business’s tolerance for risk, and is it worth that investment?”

Climate resilience is a top priority for Prologis, the world’s largest industrial landlord, said Carter Andrus, managing director and global head of operations. The company implements disaster response planning and regularly reinvests in its buildings to protect against severe storms, including tornadoes.

“Prologis regularly reevaluates its construction specifications to withstand severe weather events to the best extent possible,” Andrus said in an email. “For example, we have increased the thickness of roofing materials used and added protection around HVAC units to improve resiliency of our portfolio.”

The decimation of transportation infrastructure can cause major supply chain disruptions in the event of a tornado. Last-mile logistics companies like Senpex use technology that aggregates real-time road data from various sources, including Google Maps and OpenStreetMap, to optimize routes so the business can continue to operate.

“This is our core, main problem for logisticians,” Senpex owner and CEO Anar Mammadov said. “The efficiency of the routes and how to make sure drivers are delivering more stuff in a short period of time.” 

But most manufacturers and logistics service providers don’t have the resources to make these kinds of structural or technological investments, Fulton said, which is where the public sector and nonprofits like ALAN have to step in.

“So many organizations just don’t have the money or the time or the staff to even build a simple business continuity plan or do a simple risk assessment,” she said. “That’s no shame to those organizations; there has to be a way that we make that easier for them … It’s an industry problem that all of us need to work towards together.”

FM Global invested $300M into the 2022 launch of a program that helps policyholders protect against flood, wind and wildfire exposure, Waters said. The credit has the potential to reduce total losses by $120B, per FM Global’s website. 

The Federal Emergency Management Agency also helps communities safeguard against natural hazards through the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program. This year’s program awarded $136M to 325 applicants across 55 states and territories, per FEMA’s website.

These types of partnerships help harden infrastructure and drive business into areas that would otherwise be avoided due to climate risk, Fulton said.

“It’s going to keep our supply chains running after a disaster if we’re not losing power, if we’re not losing water, if we’re not losing whatever resource that building needs,” she said.

The threat of tornadoes is unlikely to drive companies away from certain areas, Thompson said. There’s just too many other benefits that outweigh the risks. 

Ultimately, whether or not a company lays down roots in Tornado Alley or any other market prone to natural disasters will come down to their tolerance for risk, Waters said.

“There are things that can be done to mitigate losses, but not all losses are preventable,” she said. “As an organization, the firm needs to look inward and really understand where their vulnerabilities are and where the heartbeat of their company is — that will help inform their decisions on where they’re going to build and where their logistics are located.”