Amazon Pays $91M for Baltimore Industrial Portfolio

Techwood Business Center. Image courtesy of Cushman & Wakefield

In a $90.5 million deal, Amazon has acquired Techwood Business Center, a six-building, 648,173-square-foot industrial portfolio located in the Baltimore Commons Business Park, along the Baltimore-Washington corridor.

RREEF Management LLC was the seller, according to the latest Baltimore industrial report by Cushman & Wakefield, whose local capital markets team completed the transaction.

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The industrial properties have immediate access to I-95, I-295 and I-97, offering a combination of scale and functionality in one of the highest performing supply-constrained markets in the U.S., according to Cushman & Wakefield.

Jonathan Carpenter, executive managing director of the firm’s Baltimore Capital Markets team, said in a prepared statement that the offering received tremendous interest from national and international investors. He described the bidding process as extremely competitive. Carpenter, who only identified the new owner as an e-commerce company in his remarks, said the winning bidder had a strategic interest in the business park and in the Baltimore-Washington region.

In the past 12 months, Carpenter and Senior Director Graham Savage, his colleague on the Cushman & Wakefield Baltimore capital markets team, have closed nearly $350 million in industrial deals volume. Carpenter and Savage represented the seller in the Techwood transaction.

Baltimore industrial market

The overall vacancy rate for the Baltimore industrial market in the first quarter of 2020 was roughly similar to the fourth quarter of 2019—6.3 percent in the first quarter, down slightly from 6.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2019, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s Baltimore industrial reports for the respective quarters. In Anne Arundel County, the submarket where Techwood Business Center is located, the overall vacancy rate in the first quarter of 2020 was 8.8 percent, up from 8.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2019.

In addition to the Techwood Business Center transaction, the second-biggest industrial sale in the Baltimore market during the first quarter also occurred in the Anne Arundel County submarket. Two buildings totaling 840,000 square feet at Brandon Woods III were sold to GLL Real Estate Partners Inc. for $90 million.