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Los Angeles

Ares buys site of shuttered steel mill in Inland Empire

Commercial Metals Company sells 95 acres in Rancho Cucamonga year after closure

Map of 12521 Arrow Route in Rancho Cucamonga & Barbara Smith (Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer, Commercial Metals Company) (iStock, Commercial Metals Company, Google Maps)
Map of 12521 Arrow Route in Rancho Cucamonga & Barbara Smith (Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer, Commercial Metals Company) (iStock, Commercial Metals Company, Google Maps)

A Texas-based steel manufacturer got $313 million for a 95-acre section of industrial land in the Inland Empire.

Commercial Metals Company sold the site of its shuttered operations in Rancho Cucamonga to BTC III Acquisitions LLC, an affiliate of Los Angeles-based Ares Management Corp., based on documents related to the deal.

The sale looks to be the largest industrial deal in the Inland Empire–which includes Riverside and San Bernardino counties–in recent memory. It’s significantly bigger than last year’s top industrial deal, which came in October, when Dallas-based Covington Group paid $252 million for seven industrial buildings near Victorville.

CMC did not disclose the buyer, and a representative declined an interview request. A review of public documents by The Real Deal indicated the acreage and identity of the buyer.

CMC characterized the property as “a large parcel of land,” and records show that one distribution warehouse property on the site occupies about 27 acres.

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CMC shut down its Rancho Cucamonga operations in December 2020. Ahead of the closure, a company representative blamed the closure on an unfriendly business climate, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune reported.

“Such actions are difficult to make as they impact the lives of dedicated employees,” the representative said. “However, this decision was made due to the increasingly high cost of doing business in California and excessive regulatory environment imposed by the state.”

Less than a year earlier, CMC had announced more than 100 layoffs at the Rancho Cucamonga mill as part of the company’s decision to stop buying outside scrap metal and shutter an operation that melted seized firearms. It was unclear how many additional layoffs resulted from the 2020 mill closure.

CMC, based in Irving, Texas, near Dallas, is a multi-billion dollar company with operations throughout the United States and in Germany, Poland and China. The company continues operations in several other California cities, including in San Bernardino, San Diego and Fontana, according to its website.

In a previous release, the firm said it would use the proceeds from the Rancho Cucamonga sale to help fund a new “micro mill” in Arizona. CMC bought the Rancho Cucamonga plant, along with dozens of other facilities, for $600 million in 2018 from Gerdau, a major steel producer headquartered in Brazil, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune reported.

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Commercial Real EstateIndustrial Real EstateInland Empire