Prologis buying Sunset Park property teed up as new City Harvest HQ

Mega warehouse landlord Prologis is buying a property in Sunset Park that will soon be the new headquarters of food-rescue nonprofit City Harvest.

The multinational real estate investment trust is buying the two-acre site at 150 East 52nd Street from DH Property Holdings’ Dov Hertz, who secured the site and teed up a deal to bring City Harvest to Brooklyn, sources told The Real Deal.

Prologis is paying $60 million to buy the property, which sits about half a dozen blocks from the Brooklyn Army Terminal, according to a source familiar with the deal.

When reached Wednesday afternoon, Hertz confirmed the sale.

“We’re very pleased to have been an instrumental part in finding City Harvest a long-term home to help them continue doing their good work serving the underprivileged,” he said.

The deal got its start back in June, when Hertz signed a contract to buy the property from an investment group led by Mark Karasick’s 601W Companies. The financial terms of the contract are not clear, but the site had previously been marketed with an asking price of roughly $40 million.

Once Hertz’s DH Property had the contract, the company worked to negotiate buyouts with a handful of tenants who occupied the roughly 130,000 square-foot, two-story building that sits on the site.

Hertz then negotiated a triple-net lease with City Harvest, which will relocate operations from its food-rescue warehouse in Long Island City and its corporate headquarters in Midtown South to Sunset Park.

City Harvest CEO Jilly Stephens said the nonprofit rescued 63 million pounds of food last year and provides “more resources for the significant population of New Yorkers who rely on us to get dinner on the table for their families.”

The property also includes about 35,000 square feet of parking and loading docks.

Broker Moshe Majeski represented Karasick’s 601W Companies in the deal with Hertz, and a JLL team of Rob Kossar, Tyler Peck and Stephen Palmese negotiated the sale to Prologis.  A JLL team of Kossar, Paul Mas, Adam Citron and Ellen Herman represented City Harvest in lease negotiations with Hertz. JLL’s Leslie Lanne worked on Hertz’s side of both the lease with City Harvest and the sale to Prologis.

Prologis is expected to close soon on its $12.6 billion purchase of rival Liberty Property Trust, which owns a 104-million-square-foot portfolio of warehouse and logistics properties spread across 18 markets in the country.

The company has long been considered the world’s largest logistics landlord, but that title may be facing a challenge.

Recently, the Blackstone Group has been pouring into the warehouse and logistics space. The private equity giant owned about 800 million square feet as of late October, the Wall Street Journal reported. Prologis, meanwhile, had investments totaling approximately 797 million square feet as of late September, according to the company’s website.

Hertz, meanwhile, paid $255 million last year for a site on the other side of Sunset Park, where he and his partners plan to build a 1.3 million-square-foot, multi-story distribution center.