A Swiss insurance company has sold a 406,260-square-foot distribution warehouse in Fullerton partially leased by FedEx for $156 million.
Swiss Re Group, based in Zurich, sold the industrial building at 458-486 East Lambert Road, the Orange County Business Journal reported. The buyer was an affiliate of GLP Capital Partners, based in Santa Monica.
The deal, which came out to $384 per square foot, was the highest priced industrial sale in OC this year.
Swiss Re, which claims to be the world’s largest reinsurer, paid $55 million for the 18.6-acre property in 2014.
GLP Capital, founded in 2019, runs its logistics real estate operating platform under the Modlo brand name. Its Fullerton acquisition comes a year after it closed its North American logistics real estate fund, GLP Capital Partners IV, totaling $2.3 billion.
The warehouse is now leased by FedEx, which occupies 161,460 square feet, and NorCal Beverage, which takes up the remaining 244,800 square feet. Each tenant has been there more than 10 years.
The sale is the priciest local industrial deal in Orange County since June of last year, when Menlo Equities of Menlo Park sold a distribution warehouse in Irvine leased by Amazon.com to an affiliate of CBRE Global Investors, based in Los Angeles, for $180.8 million, or $457 per square foot.
The Fullerton site is a block away from the Beckman Business Center, a 1-million-square-foot distribution campus developed in 2019 by Newport Beach-based Western Realco, which sold it in a series for more than $180 million.
In August, Sprouts Farmers Market, an organic grocer based in Phoenix, leased a 337,000-square-foot warehouse at the Goodman center, marking the largest lease in OC this year.
As for new product, the Goodman Logistics Center Fullerton, once a manufacturing plant for Kimberly-Clark, is being redeveloped by Goodman North America into a 1.5-million-square-foot logistics campus. The largest new industrial project in OC is expected to be completed this year.
The vacancy rate for distribution warehouses in Orange County was 1.2 percent in the second quarter, with average asking rents rising 9 cents to $1.34, up more than 20 percent year-over-year, according to Voit Real Estate Services, based in Newport Beach.
— Dana Bartholomew
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