Local firm Bridge Industrial picked up a 12-acre site in suburban Melrose Park for $22.6 million, with plans to add 186,000 square feet to the Chicago area’s spec industrial development pipeline.
The project, dubbed Bridge Point Melrose Park II, will be the company’s second industrial facility in the Cook County suburb, neighboring a 1.6 million-square foot industrial complex it has under development there. That facility is 86 percent pre-leased and has finalized agreements with CEVA Logistics and Expeditors International, according to Bridge Industrial.
“Following the rapid leasing velocity and overall success we’ve experienced at our neighboring Bridge Point Melrose Park, we’re eager to own another state-of-the-art facility in the highly sought-after O’Hare submarket,” Cory Welper, the firm’s director of central region acquisitions, said in a statement announcing the acquisition last month.
Though the industrial market shows signs of cooling from the red-hot pace of recent years, demand for space continues to outweigh supply as tenants wait for developers to finish projects. Bridge Industrial is retaining the property’s seller, a joint venture of Missner Group and Timber Hill, to complete the Class A industrial facility and expects it to be finished in the third quarter of next year.
Colliers’ Matthew Stauber, Thomas Rodeno and Patrick Turner represented the seller of the Melrose Park property.
The acquisition is Bridge Point’s second under its national acquisitions platform, following the purchase of a three-building, 336-852-square-foot industrial campus in Pompano Beach in South Florida for $46.3 million.
The company has completed more than three million square feet of development in the O’Hare submarket, comprising over 35 percent of new developments in that area since 2013.
Vacancies in Chicago-area industrial buildings of 200,000 square feet or more rose for the first time in nearly two years last quarter, per Colliers, a result of developers adding a record number of projects to the industrial pipeline. Still, supply remains tight and rental rates are expected to increase even if at a slower rate than the past two years.
Also in the Chicago-area pipeline are several projects from Logistics Property Co., which most recently announced a 1.2-million-square-foot logistics facility near Goose Island.
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