Charlotte-Area Industrial Portfolio Trades for $76M
Albany Road Real Estate Partners has sold a collection of 13 buildings totaling more than half a million square feet across four business parks.
CIP Real Estate has acquired more than half a million square feet of industrial space in the Charlotte, N.C., area for $75.5 million from Albany Road Real Estate Partners.
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The portfolio includes the three-building 77 Overlook campus in Charlotte, N.C., the five-building International Corporate Center in Concord, N.C., the three-building Lakefield Corporate Center in Mooresville, N.C., and the two-building SouthCross Corporate Center in Rock Hill, S.C. Totaling 560,500 square feet, the portfolio is 91 percent occupied. Tenants include Wesco Distribution, TTEC Healthcare Solutions and Winbro Group Technologies, CBRE told Commercial Property Executive. Albany Road purchased the 13 buildings for a total of $60.8 million in March 2017.
CBRE also told CPE that the new owners don’t have any major changes planned. CIP has been acquiring industrial properties throughout the U.S. and currently has five other business parks in its North Carolina portfolio, located in Greensboro, Charlotte and Cornelius . The company also owns a group of three industrial/office business parks in California’s Inland Empire submarket, which recently landed a $58.6 million refinancing.
CBRE’s Patrick Gildea, Matt Smith, Anne Johnson, Bryan Crutcher and Grayson Hawkins represented Albany Road and facilitated the sale, while Johnson and Crutcher will also continue to lease the industrial portfolio on behalf of CIP.
Industrial resilience in Charlotte
Gildea, an executive vice president at CBRE, said in prepared remarks that many commercial real estate transactions have been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic but the industrial sector remains resilient. Gildea added in his prepared statement that industrial properties were still being transacted, especially in strong markets like Charlotte and that sector’s pricing is the same as pre-COVID-19 levels, whereas other sectors have seen dips in pricing.
According to CBRE’s first quarter industrial market report, the Charlotte metro area saw $56.7 million in property transaction volume. While 12 percent lower than the previous quarter, the metro area has totaled $1.9 billion of industrial properties sold in the last five years. Charlotte’s industrial market also saw a slight uptick of 0.4 percent in asking rates to $6.95 per square foot, representing the 36th consecutive quarter of overall rent growth in the market.
