A trucking company has leased a Compton distribution warehouse in the latest response to the continued growth in online shopping and accompanying logistics.
Pacific Expressway, a trucking company based in Compton, has inked a deal with New Jersey-based PGIM Real Estate to occupy an 111,000-square-foot distribution facility at 220 West Victoria Street in the South Bay municipality, the Commercial Observer reported.
Cushman & Wakefield announced the deal and represented the landlord. Terms of the lease were not disclosed.
The brokerage said industrial vacancy rates in South Los Angeles were at 1.3 percent at the end of 2021, with 3.4 million square feet of occupancy growth throughout the year.
“This lease demonstrates the robust demand we continue to see for industrial and logistics product in the South Bay, a location providing convenient access to a large population, extensive freeway network, two of the world’s busiest ports, and major airports,” said C&W’s Rusty Smith, who along with C&W’s Steve Bohannon represented the landlord in the transaction.
The building is south of the 91 Freeway and West of the 47 Freeway and not far from the 710, 405 and 110 interstates. It’s also about 13 miles from the Ports of L.A. and Long Beach, and about 16 miles from Los Angeles International Airport.
The rapid growth of e-commerce by such companies as Amazon have led to a rush for logistics warehouses in Southern California, and across the nation. Developers across the U.S. are racing to build new warehouses, as vacancy rates approach sub-1 percent in some markets.
Warehouses that are delivered get snatched up quickly.
The trend is especially strong In Los Angeles, where spec warehouses larger than 100,000 square feet are leased in weeks. The Inland Empire has the tightest industrial market in the country, with a vacancy of 0.8 percent in the fourth quarter, where large warehouses are leased within a month.
In the South Bay, warehouse deals have been robust. In the third quarter, total industrial vacancy in Torrance dropped to 0.7 percent, with asking rents reaching $1.21 per square foot — slightly above the South Bay’s average of $1.18 a foot, according to Newmark.
Epirus, a defense firm with drone-killing technology, in November leased a 100,000-square-foot warehouse-and-office building in Torrance. https://therealdeal.com/la/2021/11/12/anti-drone-specialist-takes-100k-sf-warehouse-in-torrance/
In October, Rexford Industrial Realty paid $217 million for an 80-acre industrial storage in Rancho Dominguez, among the biggest industrial sales in the L.A. region this year. A year earlier, it announced plans to build an 80,000-square-foot warehouse in Torrance.
[Commercial Observer] – Dana Bartholomew