Amazon to open 202K sf warehouse in East LA

UPDATED, Jan. 26, 2022, 1:06 p.m.: East Los Angeles is getting a brand new Amazon distribution facility, The Real Deal has learned.

Amazon signed a 10-year lease for a 202,000-square-foot warehouse at 3301 Medford Street, just north of the I-10, property records show. The lease was signed in 2020 and the property is set to open late this year or early next year, an Amazon spokesperson told TRD.

The site will be a last-mile delivery station and Amazon expects to employ hundreds of part-time and full-time workers at the site.

Xebec Realty is building the facility, which has interior space for up to 167 vans and ten loading docks, along with a 4,000-square-foot office, according to Krusinski Construction Company, which is working on the facility.

Dallas-based industrial landlord Xebec Realty bought the site for $14.4 million in 2017 and secured a $20.8 million construction loan the same year.

Seattle-based Amazon has options to extend its lease for up to 10 more years, according to property documents. Financial terms of the lease were not disclosed and Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.

The average asking rent for properties in Central Los Angeles, which includes parts of East L.A., has stayed steady at around $1.11 per square foot per month from the time Amazon signed its lease in October 2020 to the fourth quarter of last year, according to NAI Capital and JLL.

Xebec has been on a development spree in Los Angeles, most recently purchasing six acres in Sylmar for $24 million, with plans to redevelop an older industrial property on the site into a new Class A complex.

Elsewhere in the San Fernando Valley, the firm is planning to build more than 600,000 square feet of industrial space across 28 acres of land it bought for $92 million in 2020.

Amazon’s lease in East L.A., meanwhile, expands its growing portfolio of warehouses, distribution centers and data centers. Since the start of the pandemic, Amazon has more than doubled its space across North America to more than 410 million square feet.

A “significant” part of Amazon’s capital investments since the pandemic “has been to support those efforts in middle and last-mile capacity,” Amazon’s director of investor relations, Dave Fildes, said on an earnings call in July.

“Amazon is constantly exploring new locations,” a spokesperson told TRD.

This story has been updated to include information from an Amazon spokesperson.

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