Walmart Buys Riverside Distribution Site for $223 Million

Walmart doesn’t seem to be fazed by the Inland Empire’s shaky industrial market fundamentals.

The Arkansas-based retail giant has purchased its distribution facility in Riverside for $223 million, L.A. Business First reported. The company’s real estate arm acquired the 507,000-square-foot cold storage facility from State Street Corporation.

Walmart has been leasing the site at 1001 Columbia Avenue from State Street since 2010. It plans to continue temperature-controlled distribution operations from the property. Walmart’s nearest Supercenter locations are roughly five miles north at 1120 South Mount Vernon Avenue in Colton and eight miles south at 6250 Valley Springs Parkway in Riverside.

The property comes complete with 22,500 square feet of office space as well as 42-foot clear height, 565 parking stalls, 120 trailer stalls and 98 dock doors. Walmart was represented in the transaction by JLL’s Scott Coyle, Peter McWilliams and Tim O’Rourke, while Eastdil Secured represented seller State Street Corporation.

Walmart’s acquisition is a positive sign for the local industrial market as the broader sector in the Inland Empire and beyond struggles to find its footing. While other types of industrial facilities aren’t seeing outsize demand, properties such as these are seeing increasing interest, according to the JLL team.

“Demand for temperature-controlled logistics infrastructure continues to outpace supply across the Greater Los Angeles basin,” Coyle said, per Connect CRE. “This transaction highlights the irreplaceable nature of existing large-format cold storage facilities and reinforces the Inland Empire’s role as a key market for Southern California’s food distribution ecosystem.”

Cold storage facilities might be attracting investor interest, but the industrial market in the Inland Empire as a whole tells a different story. Vacancy rose in the first quarter to 8.1 percent with a total of 53.6 million square feet currently vacant across the submarket — a sharp drop from the 1.9 million empty square feet recorded in Q1 2022, according to Colliers’ Q1 2026 report. Net absorption reached its third-lowest total on record with negative 3.6 million square feet, while construction activity was low with 1.4 million square feet of new starts in the first quarter.

— Chris Malone Méndez