W. P. Carey Buys 1.2 MSF Columbus Facility

VanTrust Real Estate has sold Building 2 of Rickenbacker Exchange at Commercial Point, a 1.2 million-square-foot speculative industrial building in Commercial Point, Ohio.

According to REBusinessOnline, W.P. Carey paid $94.1 million for the facility, in a transaction brokered by Colliers’ Midwest Investment Services Team. The group was led by Vice Chair Alex Cantu and Executive Vice President Alex Davenport.

Building 2’s change of hands takes place roughly two years after its completion and subsequent full lease to HanesBrands. The Columbus Dispatch reports that the deal was the biggest new industrial lease in the city that year, as the clothing brand sought a distribution center that could directly access customers around the Northeast and Midwest.

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Building 2 is the second largest to come online at Rickenbacker Exchange, an 875-acre master-planned industrial park. Rickenbacker’s North Campus, where Building 2 lies, is a portion spanning four buildings across 320 aces. Within and around Building 2, HanesBrands has access to an exterior with 120 loading docks, four drive-in doors and 728 parking spaces, and an interior with 40-foot clear heights and 56- by 50-foot column spacings.

Building 1, a 1.2 million-square-foot facility, came online in August of 2023. Building 3, set to be the campus’ largest, will measure more than 1.5 million square feet. In contrast, Building 4 will span 238,000 square feet.

Located at 521 Exchange Way, the campus’ neighbors include facilities operated and occupied by Amazon, DHL, FedEx, Lowe’s, Walmart and Whirlpool. Building 2 and the larger North Campus are within 22 miles of interchanges to Interstates 70, 71 and 270, as well as access to a Norfolk & Southern Intermodal connection. Downtown Columbus lies 13 miles to the north, and the Rickenbacker Exchange is within a day’s drive of the Northeast and Midwest’s largest cities, which have a combined population of more than 110 million residents.

Columbus, a midwestern industrial darling

Nearly all of the Columbus industrial market’s fundamentals are among the best in the Midwest. According to CommercialEdge’s latest national industrial report, The Discovery City had a vacancy rate of 2.7 percent as of February, a pipeline of 5.6 million square feet and year to-date sales of $123 million. Part of the market’s growth comes from the chip fabrication and data center sectors, as Intel is moving forward with the development of a 1,000-acre, $20 billion manufacturing campus.