Hillwood Buys Two Distribution Buildings in Atlanta

By Scott Baltic, Contributing Editor

Hillwood Investment Properties’ U.S. Industrial Fund II has acquired Westridge Logistics Center, a two-building, 320,000-square-foot Class A distribution park in McDonough, Ga., in Atlanta’s southern suburbs, Hillwood announced late last week.

Hillwood declined to disclose the purchase price or to identify the seller.

Sited at 418-450 Westridge Parkway and completed in 2006, Westridge is in the I-75 South/Henry County industrial submarket, about a little more than one mile from the I-75/GA Hwy 155 interchange. The property is currently 95 percent occupied, a Hillwood spokesperson told Commercial Property Executive.

The asset features concrete tilt wall construction, rear loading multi-tenant configuration, 24-foot minimum clear height, 180- to 210-foot building depths, ESFR sprinklers, 120-foot truck court depths and T-5 lighting. The layout reportedly offers flexible suite sizes from 15,000 to 100,000 square feet.

“Expanding our portfolio in Atlanta makes strategic sense and fits perfectly with our strategy to acquire and develop high-quality, functional industrial real estate in major U.S. markets,” Tom Fishman, executive VP of acquisitions and dispositions at Hillwood, said in a prepared statement.

Frank Fallon, Brain Budnick and Chris Riley with CBRE in Atlanta represented the seller.

The property was developed by Lincoln Property Co. According to online news reports, the Atlanta office of LPC brokered leases for nearly 72,000 square feet of space at Westridge in the first half of this year. Another report, from when the project was still under construction, stated that LPC chose to go with a shallow-bay configuration because that layout was less common in the area, which was then dominated by bulk warehouse space.

Absorption of industrial space in metro Atlanta continues at a steady pace, as vacancy declines slightly and rents rise somewhat more on a percentage basis, according to a second-quarter report from Colliers International. Total absorption this year is projected to hit more than 15 million square feet. The delivery of nearly 17 million square feet of new space by next month is therefore likely to force the vacancy level up, though Colliers expects average vacancy to remain below 10 percent.

Average vacancy for shallow-bay space in the south metro submarket in the second quarter was 10.8 percent, with an average rent of $3.22, again per Colliers.