A 3.6 million-square-foot portfolio of industrial properties is hitting the market in the Boston area.
Equity Industrial Partners is offering the 11-property package at a “whisper price” of $360 million. CBRE Capital Markets’ Scott Dragos, Doug Jacoby, Chris Skeffington, Roy Sandeman, Anthony Hayes, Timothy Mulhall and Daniel Hines, based in Boston, are representing the seller.
The sale comes after industrial real estate’s breakout year in 2019. E-commerce companies of all stripes snapped up millions of square feet of logistics space, including much of the nearly 2 million square feet of spec-built space under construction in the Boston area.
The vacancy rate for the region’s overall 158.6 million square feet of industrial space is running at about 10 percent, below the vacancy rates for office space in many Greater Boston suburban submarkets, according to Colliers’ third-quarter report. The average price per square foot for industrial space is now hovering around $10 per square foot, up from $6 a square foot since 2016.
Equity’s portfolio is 91 percent leased to 16 tenants with a weighted average remaining lease term of 9.56 years, CBRE said. Major tenants include Shaw’s, Marshalls, Cole Haan, Sonepar and Yankee Candle. The buildings range in size from Woburn’s 817,000-square-foot 83 Commerce Way, built in 1978, to Braintree’s 101 Campanelli Drive, just over 40,000 square feet in size, built in 1968 and renovated in 2018. The average size of a building in the portfolio is 327,031 square feet.
“The Metro Boston Logistics Portfolio will provide investors with an exceptional opportunity to acquire true scale in one of the most sought-after markets in the country,” Scott Dragos, an executive vice president of Capital Markets for CBRE in Boston, said in a statement. “It is extremely rare when an industrial portfolio of this scale, credit and quality with proximity to Boston becomes available. This offering will give investors the ability to acquire a secure portfolio of functional logistics assets with almost 60 percent of the portfolio anchored by credit tenants and a WALT of close to 10 years.”
