By Jack Stubbs
With steady employment growth and the continued expansion of e-commerce companies like Amazon, industrial warehouse space around the Puget Sound is increasingly attracting big-name investor interest.
The Kent Valley in particular—which ranges from Kent to Puyallup, and encompasses cities like Auburn and Sumner—continues to see activity on the industrial side, with Boston-based real estate investment management firm TA Realty having made a number of acquisitions in Kent and Auburn in recent months.
In two late-August transaction that were recently recorded, the company sold a three-building industrial property in Tukwila and a warehouse/distribution building in SeaTac for a combined $32.5 million, King County records show. The buyer of the properties was PP TANGO WA LLC, an entity based in Chicago, IL.
The property in Tukwila, located at 4455-4471, 4475-4488 and 4487-4497 S. 134th Place and called the Fostoria Business Park, sold for $16.5 million. The property includes three industrial/warehouse buildings totaling 82,812 rentable square feet, according to the property listing on office space.com. As of August 2019, there were approximately 10,200 square feet available for lease at the complex, which was originally built in 1980.
According to the description on Northstream Development’s web site—who purchased the property in 1991—some of the primary features of Fostoria Business Park include grade-level truck doors, 83 parking spaces and convenient access to Southcenter and Sea-Tac Airport via Interstate-5 and I-405.
The property is also roughly four miles west of Renton and ten miles south of Seattle, and the city of Tukwila, in particular, has seen a couple of transactions in recent months. In mid-March, San Francisco-based Lift Partners acquired four parcels totaling just under 220,000 square feet industrial/office space—located at 1200, 1210, 1230 and 1228 Andover Park E.—for $11.3 million.
The property in SeaTac, located at 2301-2383 S. 200th St., is a two-story warehouse/distribution facility that totals 79,050 square feet, according to public documents.
TA Realty’s recent sale of the properties in Tukwila and SeaTac come just a few weeks after the company’s mid-August acquisition two properties to the south for a combined $22 million: these were the 60,530 square foot Pacific West Business Center in Kent and the 60,852 square foot White River Corporate Park in Auburn.
Cities throughout the Kent Valley are increasingly viewed as attractive investments for industrial properties, as several of the recent transactions indicate. “The Kent Valley is one of the strongest industrial markets in the country, due primarily to its location near the Ports of Seattle and Tacoma, Sea-Tac International Airport and rail connections,” said Bill Condon of Colliers International at the time of the transaction.“Available existing product is limited, however, as are developable land sites, so these properties drew a lot of interest from investors looking to place funds in an environment of robust tenant demand and rising rents.”
Following up on its mid-April purchase of two industrial properties in Puyallup for a combined $38.5 million, TA Realty in mid-June acquired another warehouse in Auburn for $25.5 million from San Francisco-based Stockbridge Real Estate.
