An industrial building in Whittier has sold for as much as $28 million, according to a source familiar with the transaction.
Realterm US Inc. purchased the property, at 12910 Mulberry Drive, from Nuveen Real Estate and Greenlaw Partners.
Cushman & Wakefield Inc.’s Jeffrey Cole, Jeff Chiate, Mike Adey and Ed Hernandez represented the seller in the transaction.
The property was built in 1961 and renovated in 2019. It has 16-foot clearance, 17 dock-high loading doors and truck courts.
In addition to the industrial space, the building has nearly 8,000 square feet of offices.
“This offering represented an infill industrial investment opportunity in the Mid-Counties market of Los Angeles County, one of the most sought-after infill industrial markets in the nation,” Cole said in a statement.
“Recently upgraded and fully leased to a high-tech ecommerce tenant, this was a rare and sizable institutional-quality industrial asset with significant barriers to entry and limited new development opportunities,” he added.
The property is fully leased to Shift Technologies Inc., an ecommerce company dealing with used automobiles. It serves as the company’s Southern California regional operations center.
Shift had five years left on its lease at the time of the sale, according to data from CoStar Group Inc.
It isn’t the only industrial property to change hands. 2019 was a huge year for industrial sales, the largest of which was Harridge Development Group’s $241.5 million sale of the 26-acre Los Angeles Times printing plant in downtown. The site was purchased by New York-based Atlas Capital Group.
Earlier in 2019, Goodman Group acquired Boeing Co.’s former C-17 manufacturing facility in Long Beach for $230 million. It plans to redevelop the site.
Experts say demand for industrial sites is still high in 2020.
Ecommerce and consumer expectations for fast delivery, combined with L.A.’s status as a major population center near one of the world’s busiest ports, have made the region’s industrial market increasingly tight.
In the fourth quarter of 2019, 10.8 million square feet of industrial properties either sold or leased, according to data from Jones Lang LaSalle Inc.
Asking rents during the quarter shot up to 90 cents a square foot, up 7 cents in a year. Vacancy rates, meanwhile, fell to 1.9%, down from 2.2% the previous year.
