JLL Income Property Trust Pays $190M for Industrial Park
The tenant roster at this Research Triangle property includes a major biotech and life science company.
JLL Income Property Trust has acquired the West Raleigh Distribution Center, an industrial park in Apex, N.C, for about $190 million. Beacon Partners was the seller of the five-building property, according to Yardi Research Data.
Completed between 2024 and 2025, the buildings total 985,000 square feet and are 87 percent occupied by a mix of eight tenants, according to the buyer. The largest of these firms is a major distributor to the biotech and health-care sectors.
The Raleigh-Durham biotech and health-care cluster is one of the most important nationwide, with an existing presence of the pharmaceutical industry and massive new investments in biomanufacturing facilities, CBRE reported.
Between 2019 and 2024, Raleigh-Durham life science companies secured almost $4.4 billion in venture capital funding, the 13th-highest amount in the world, according to CBRE.
JLL Income Property Trust is buying after a wave of dispositions totaling about $300 million in 2024, according to CEO Allan Swaringen, who noted in a statement that the company “has seen the strong fundamentals of the industrial sector generate stable demand.”
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As of the end of the second quarter of 2025, industrial investments comprised about one-third of JLL Income Property Trust’s total $6.5 billion portfolio. The company owns $2 billion in such assets across 58 industrial properties.
The deal comes at a time of solid investor interest in Raleigh-Durham industrial assets, Colliers reported. Other recent deals include the acquisition by Town Lane of a 2.7 million-square-foot portfolio consisting of 55 buildings in six industrial parks, plus 40 acres of development-ready land.
Also, Beacon Development Co. sold Beacon Commerce Park, a three-building, 630,933 square-foot industrial park, to KKR Real Estate Select Trust for about $121.7 million. The park was fully leased at the time of sale.
The recent more accommodative stance by the Federal Reserve—which cut interest rates by a quarter point on Wednesday—has the potential to unlock increased transaction volume in the second half of 2025, Colliers noted.
Raleigh-Durham industrial fundamentals strong
Raleigh-Durham industrial fundamentals, while not seeing the explosive growth of the pandemic era, are nevertheless strong enough to support investment interest.
Industrial construction activity remains strong, with about 4.8 million square feet underway as of the second quarter. Nearly 20 percent of that pipeline is preleased, with activity increasingly driven by manufacturing and light industrial users, Colliers explained.
The market saw about 487,130 square feet of net absorption during second quarter of 2025, according to Colliers, with the overall vacancy rate for industrial rising to 6.4 percent.
Nearly 3.6 million square feet of new product is slated to be delivered in the second half of the year, Colliers reported. The majority is spec, but several large build-to-suit projects are also underway, signaling continued demand for industrial space.
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