Prologis, one of the world’s largest industrial developers and investors, has bought another last-mile warehouse, this time on Chicago’s Near West Side.
The real estate investment trust purchased the 70,000-square-foot warehouse at 455 North Ashland Avenue for $12 million earlier this month, Crain’s reported. The property is near Fulton Market District, which has seen an increase in development in recent years. That may signal the industrial giant’s plans to convert the facility into a last-mile warehouse space.
The last time the warehouse changed hands, in 2017, Phil Denny paid $8.1 million for the property.
Prologis, a San Francisco-based REIT which owns 963 million square feet of industrial space in 19 countries — up from about 800 million square feet at the end of 2019 — has 4,655 buildings across the U.S. Investment firm Blackstone Group has also made aggressive acquisitions in the sector in recent years.
Industrial space was in short supply before the coronavirus pandemic, hitting a record low in 2019. Since the health crisis, the online-shopping trend has only strengthened, which led Prologis to report higher-than-normal rent collections in the last quarter.
The company’s CEO, Hamid Moghadam, is so bullish on the sector overall that he said at a recent webinar that the only thing that could get in the way of the company’s success is if someone were to invent a Star Trek transporter. [Crain’s] — Georgia Kromrei