Pico Rivera-based packing and design firm Bay Cities has signed a 150,000-square-foot lease for industrial space in Santa Fe Springs.
The firm signed a 10-year lease at Oltmans Construction Company’s 9206 Santa Fe Springs Road, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal.
Savills Inc. ‘s Bart Pucci, who represented Bay Cities in the deal, said there were multiple offers for the property from prospective tenants, an indication of how tight the market is for industrial space.
“In the past, you might go on a survey of several buildings and have a couple to look at and when you did find the building you wanted, you may be in competition with one other company,” Pucci said. “Nowadays, the selection is much tighter and the competition for every building is fierce.”
Pucci said that the property is smaller than what his clients wanted, but said location was “the most important” factor in their decision.
The property is “just minutes away” from Bay Cities headquarters, CEO Greg Tucker said. The property has 12 assembly lines, 29 loading positions and heavy power.
Vacancy in some Southern California submarkets is below 2 percent, largely because of a post-pandemic explosion in demand from e-commerce and logistics tenants.
Tenants are scooping up space as soon as they possibly can. Earlier this week, Duke Realty pre-leased the entirety of a 1.2-million-square-foot logistics facility in Perris to third-party logistics firm Lecangs.
In September, Cambro Manufacturing leased a nearly 434,000-square-foot manufacturing building in Huntington Beach that won’t be complete for another year.
The wider SoCal region leads the nation in industrial investment sales and accounted for more than 15 percent of all U.S. industrial transactions between January and August.
There is almost no Class A space currently available in the region, making new Class A projects no brainers for developers like CenterPoint, which recently bought a development site in Signal Hill with plans for a 100,000-square-foot facility.
[LABJ] — Dennis Lynch