Blackstone’s Link Logistics scores engineering tenant for 72K sf at Brea facility

Link Logistics Real Estate scored an engineering tooling operation to fill 72,275 square feet of space at one of its facilities in Orange County.

The New York-based landlord, owned by Blackstone, signed Products Engineering Corporation to a long-term lease for around 75 percent of its 101,280-square-foot facility in Brea, according to an announcement from CBRE, which brokered the deal for Link Logistics. Terms of the lease were not disclosed.

The facility includes 26-foot warehouse ceilings, 10 dock doors and around 3,500 square feet of office space.

Link Logistics bought the building at 566 Vanguard Way as part of a $116 million acquisition of 18 properties in 2019, records show.

Products Engineering, currently based in the South Bay city of Torrance, makes a number of engineering tools, including protractors, rulers and square blades.

The lease comes as Orange County is seeing historically low vacancy rates for industrial real estate.

In the third quarter, vacancy rates dipped to 1.3 percent across the county, according to CBRE. Lease rates have also skyrocketed 26 percent year-over-year, with average asking rates in

Northern Orange County — where Brea is located — hitting $1.22 per square foot. Average asking rents in South Orange County hit $1.44 per square foot in the third quarter.

The low vacancy rates have led giant e-commerce heavyweights such as Amazon, to start buying up office real estate for conversion into industrial space. Earlier this week, Amazon bought a 30-acre office campus in Brea for $165 million with plans to build a distribution center.