Southwest Side warehouse buyer pays up to be Amazon’s landlord

Purchase was near record-high psf in 2020

From left: GCP CEO Alan Yang, 3507 West 51st Street and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (Courtesy 42 Floors; Getty; GCP)
From left: GCP CEO Alan Yang, 3507 West 51st Street and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (Courtesy 42 Floors; Getty; GCP)

For landlords, having Amazon as a tenant means never having to say, “where’s the rent?” But that piece of mind comes at a price.

Investment firm GCP paid $42 million for a 316,550-square-foot warehouse at 3507 West 51st Street on the Southwest Side, according to Crain’s. Amazon leased the Gage Park complex earlier this year.

California-based GCP’s purchase pencils out to $132 per square foot, making it among the most expensive industrial sales in 2020 in the city for a single building, according to the report.

The seller was Rosemont-based Conor Commercial, which developed the property.

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GCP was founded last year by Alan Yang, a former executive at GLP. The warehouse buy was made through GCP’s logistics platform, Modlo, Crain’s reported.

The local industrial market remains strong thanks in part to Amazon, which has been gobbling up distribution and logistics space in Illinois. By mid-year, the e-commerce behemoth occupied 12 warehouse properties in the state. From March to July, Amazon leased 11 million square feet of distribution centers and warehouses in the Chicago area alone.

The most expensive industrial sale in Chicago this year was Brennan Investment Group and Investcorp’s $74.2 million purchase of an eight-building industrial park near O’Hare International Airport. [Crain’s] — Orion Jones