LBA Realty, a California investment firm, paid $16.1 million for a building in Chicago’s Goose Island whose lease to a Cloud manufacturing startup marked the area’s largest industrial lease in the first quarter.
LBA bought the one-story building at 1224 Hooker Street, near the North Branch Canal, from RREEF America, a unit of German asset manager DWS, property records show. Fast Radius leases the entire 44,700-square-foot property, which sits on a 1.4 acre lot.
The purchase comes after Irvine, California-based LBA cut its exposure to the industrial market. The firm sold a 60 percent stake in two industrial portfolios in January to Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust through its industrial arm LBA Logistics. The packages, valued at $1.6 billion, comprise 71 properties that total 9.5 million square feet. They are 95 percent occupied and mostly in California and the state of Washington.
In Chicago, the company owns 41,000 Madison Street in Hillsdale, a 43,000-square-foot warehouse that it bought in 2018 for $14.8 million. LBA didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The deal comes as e-commerce companies and big box retailers compete for industrial space in the city and some tenants engage in bidding wars to lock down warehouse leases. For the first half of the year, transactions involving companies such as Amazon, Walmart and Target boosted the Chicago industrial market to a record 26.2 million square feet of new leases.