Taylor & Mathis to Oversee Leasing of IndCor’s 1.2 MSF Tampa Portfolio

July 28, 2011
By Barbra Murray, Contributing Editor

Lisa Ross

IndCor Properties Inc. has been doling out major management and leasing assignments over the last few weeks, and Taylor & Mathis of Florida L.L.C., a division of real estate company Taylor & Mathis has just secured one of them. The commercial real estate services firm will oversee leasing of IndCor’s portfolio of industrial assets totaling 1.2 million square feet in Tampa.

T&M will be responsible for filling up the tenant roster at 20 industrial properties ranging in size from 21,500 to 140,000 square feet. Fifteen of the facilities are located in the East Tampa area, where the direct vacancy rate is 12.6 percent, as per a report by commercial real estate services firm Colliers International, and the remaining five sit in the Airport submarket, which features a 10 percent vacancy rate.

T&M will be able to count on improvements in the Tampa industrial market as it takes on the new leasing assignment. “We’re not seeing a lot of new companies coming into the area, but one of the dramatic changes recently is existing distribution and manufacturing companies have started to grow,” Lisa Ross, managing director of leasing with T&M, told Commercial Property Executive.

Also working in the team’s favor is the ownership; the nearly one-year-old IndCor is an affiliate of Blackstone Real Estate Advisors. “One important factor to tenants, especially as they grow, is the knowledge that the landlord has the funds to finance improvements,” Ross noted. “And they want the comfort level of knowing that the landlord is stable and going to be around for a long time, and the building won’t constantly change hands.”

Ross and colleague Monica Verville, director of leasing, are heading up the IndCor leasing team. Verville has facilitated over 600,000 square feet of transactions since she joined T&M six years ago, and Ross brings to the table a 17-year history in the Tampa market. Both boast a thorough knowledge of the local industrial real estate scene, and Ross is familiar with many of the IndCor buildings. The group of assets is part of a 23 million square-foot portfolio that Blackstone acquired from distribution center provider ProLogis as part of a multi-faceted $1 billion deal in late 2010, and Ross is a former director of leasing at ProLogis.

“I know the IndCor portfolio because we built a lot of the properties when I was with ProLogis,” she said.

With the new IndCor contract, T&M’s Tampa leasing portfolio has doubled. The firm is one of a few commercial real estate services companies that have significantly increased their third-party industrial leasing and/or management responsibilities through new IndCor assignments. Last week, CB Richard Ellis Group announced that it had been chosen by IndCor to provide property management services for a 22 million square-foot national portfolio. And just over two weeks ago, Cassidy Turley revealed that had won a contract to manage a 7.8 million square-foot portfolio located in various cities in the Central U.S., and news emerged that Jones Lang LaSalle had been awarded a nearly 5.7 million square-foot leasing assignment for properties in Atlanta, Charlotte and Miami.