Taurus Investment buys 12 more Chicago industrial buildings

Chicago is now largest portfolio for the Boston-based investor

Lathan Allen, managing director, Taurus Investment Holdings (Taurus Investment Holdings, iStock)
Lathan Allen, managing director, Taurus Investment Holdings (Taurus Investment Holdings, iStock)

UPDATED: Feb. 2, 2022, 1:45 p.m. Taurus Investment Holdings bought 12 industrial properties in Chicago, a total of 780,000 square feet, as part of an 18-building acquisition.

The deal makes Chicago the biggest portfolio for the Boston-based investor, which paid $145 million for the 18-building portfolio that includes properties in Cincinnati and Indianapolis, according to the Chicago Business Journal.

“Our strategy is to buy portfolios between $30 [million] and $600 million in size and the reason we do that is because we are looking for tenant and geographical distribution in the assets that we purchase, and this is what this portfolio represents,” Lathan Allen, managing director of Taurus, told the Business Journal.

Allen said Taurus owns 5.6 million square feet of industrial space in Chicago and expects to add 500 million square feet of industrial space nationally this year. This week’s acquisition comes two weeks after the company recapitalized another portfolio with Chicago properties.

Taurus bought a 28-building Chicago-area industrial portfolio in 2020 for $154 million.

Allen said the pandemic has boosted the need for industrial space.

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“The trends in e-commerce, such as people buying online have escalated to 40 percent, and the supply-chain issues at the ports have created a demand for industrial space like storage,” he told the Business Journal. “That’s what makes industrial properties so attractive to investors these days.”

E-commerce companies have been contributing to the surge in demand for industrial space. Amazon, Target and Wayfair have expanded into the Chicago market as online shopping increases. That’s had a trickle-down effect on logistics firms that service the e-commerce industry. At the end of last year, Apex Logistics leased an almost 300,000-square-foot warehouse under construction in Bensenville.

Chicago’s industrial market has been so hot that developers in Bensenville bought and razed a residential subdivision to build four warehouses near O’Hare.

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[Chicago Business Journal]

Correction: Corrects spelling of Allen throughout.