By Jack Stubbs
On Thursday, December 27th, LBA Realty, a company that invests in commercial and industrial properties in major markets throughout the Western U.S., acquired six warehouse/distribution buildings in SeaTac, Washington totaling approximately 490,000 square feet, King County records show. Irvine, California-based LBA Realty acquired the six properties—as part of three separate transactions totaling $98.5 million—from San Francisco-based Prologis Inc., a leading global developer and owner of industrial properties.
Prologis Inc. did not respond to emailed requests for comment about the transactions in time for the publishing of this story.
The six assets are a variety of storage warehouse/distribution buildings located roughly twelve miles south of Seattle in the city of SeaTac, just south of the Seattle–Tacoma International Airport. The properties are part of Prologis Park SeaTac, according to the developer’s web site, a complex that is located within five minutes of the Sea-Tac Airport Cargo Entrance. The industrial park, which is one of the premier airfreight facilities in the Seattle area and provides a spacious location overlooking Mt. Rainier and the Sea-Tac Airport runways, also offers dock levelers and excellent truck maneuvering.
The three transactions included the sale of six buildings in total. The first property, located at 18900 8th Ave. S., is an 88,800 square foot storage warehouse built in 2005 that sits on just under five acres, according to public documents, while the second property, located 18850 8th Ave. S., is a 105,824 square foot storage warehouse also constructed in 2005. The third property, located at 811 S. 192nd St., is a warehouse/distribution facility constructed in 1998 that totals just over 19,000 square feet. The fourth property, constructed in 2001, totals 60,455 square feet. The final two properties, also built in 1998 and sitting on roughly 13 acres, comprise just over 216,000 square feet of warehouse/distribution space. In addition to the six buildings, the transactions also included just over three acres of vacant commercial land, according to public documents.
LBA operates a diverse array of office and industrial properties in major markets throughout the Western U.S. including California, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Nevada, Texas and Utah, according to the company’s web site. LBA’s office and industrial investment program focuses on properties with a target minimum purchase price of $10 million. Since 1995, LBA has acquired more than $5 billion in real estate assets on behalf of multiple investment funds.
In early August 2018, the company acquired an 81,700 square foot warehouse/office property in Renton for $11.3 million, or approximately $141 per square foot, from True Partners LLC.
Founded in 1991, Prologis is the largest provider of industrial warehouse and distribution facilities in the Americas, according to the company’s web site. Prologis’ scale across the Americas allows the company to provide its customers with a broad selection of top-quality facilities in strategic logistics locations. As of June 2018, Prologis owned or had investments 435 million square feet of industrial real estate space across 2,334 buildings and 3,087 acres of land, according to the company’s web site.
Prologis operates various industrial properties throughout the Puget Sound region. Some of these include the two-story, 229,500 square foot Kent-Northwest Corporate Park 19 building in Kent; the 185,700 square foot Sumner 7 building; and the Trans-Pacific 3 project in Fife.
Prologis has been active in the Puget Sound region over the last few months. In early September, the company purchased a 10-acre property, including five Pepsi-owned office/warehouse buildings totaling almost 207,000 square feet, in the Mount Baker neighborhood of Seattle for $65 million from the global real estate division of New York-based PepsiCo.
And on October 1st, the company sold five industrial assets in Kent totaling just over one million square feet to Singapore-based Mapletree Investments Ltd. for $185.3 million. The acquisitions in Kent were part of a larger international logistics portfolio acquisition, according to a statement on Mapletree Investment’s web site. In early October, Mapletree announced the acquisition of a 16.5 million square foot logistics portfolio for $1.1 billion from Prologis.
