Bottle shock: Home Depot buys 7-acre Coca-Cola site for $63M

Home Depot picked up a 7.3-acre site that houses a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Queens’ Maspeth neighborhood for $63 million, sources told The Real Deal.

The world’s largest home improvement retailer is planning a big-box store on the site, but will have to wait for the Coca-Cola Bottling Company’s triple-net-lease to expire in March 2020. Home Depot would either replace the 202,000-square-foot warehouse at 59-02 Borden Avenue with a newly constructed store, or convert the existing the property.

If constructed ground-up, the Home Depot store would be much smaller, spanning between 100,000 to 130,000 square feet, sources said. A spokesperson for Home Depot said it “hasn’t announced anything along those lines.”

Francis McGorry, president of Coca-Cola Refreshments, confirmed the sale of the property by Kaymac Corporation, which had owned the site since before developing it in the 1950s.

Sources said Coca-Cola, the world’s largest beverage company, is considering relocating the bottling plant to Elmsford in Westchester County and will continue to operate its other distribution facilities in the city, including one in Maspeth.

McGorry said in a statement, “We look forward to continuing to operate in New York and are evaluating our options to ensure we continue to provide world class service to our customers and the people who enjoy our beverages.”

Sources said Home Depot partnered with unidentified developer in the purchase, though the retailer led the deal.

Kaymac had hired a Pinnacle Realty team led by David Junik, Decio Baio and James Tack to market the sale in March, when sources had pegged it to sell north of $70 million.The site, located near the Long Island Expressway, offers 316,200 buildable square feet.

Elsewhere in Maspeth, Chetrit Group proposed a mixed-use project at an eight-acre industrial complex at 57-46 56th Street late last year.