Lift Partners Buys Santa Clara Industrial Buildings

Lift Partners is growing its industrial holdings south of its San Francisco home.

The real estate investment firm, which is based in San Francisco, bought a three-building property at 651 Martin Avenue in Santa Clara for about $25.8 million, the Silicon Valley Business Journal reported. The 7-acre site is located one block west of San Jose Mineta International Airport and the San Jose city limits. An affiliate of Vantage Data Centers sold the property.

The three buildings consist of a roughly 29,600-square-foot warehouse, a 44,000-square-foot warehouse and a nearly 4,400-square-foot service center. When Vantage Data Centers owned the site, it proposed erecting a 468,000-square-foot data center, but the application for the project was withdrawn due to inactivity, according to city documents cited by the Business Journal.

The Martin Avenue property can accommodate up to 148,635 square feet of new development, according to JLL, which represented the seller. The property is an outlier in the region due to its size and heavy industrial zoning, said JLL’s Erik Hanson, per the Business Journal.

Lift Partners’ purchase in Santa Clara follows another industrial buy from the company on the Peninsula late last year. In December, the firm acquired the 120,000-square-foot industrial building at 100 Utah Avenue in South San Francisco from Goodwill San Francisco Bay in a $31.8 million sale-leaseback deal.

Silicon Valley has emerged as a hub of industrial investment in the Bay Area.

Last month, Clarion Partners bought a 267,100-square-foot industrial building in Fremont leased by Tesla for $132.3 million. In March, Redco Development acquired a vacant 13-acre former UPS facility at 1245 Hammerwood Avenue in Sunnyvale for $42 million; it plans to redevelop the site with a 265,000-square-foot industrial building. At the top of this year, Morgan Stanley Investment Management bought a two-building, 290,000-square-foot manufacturing property in Fremont from Angelo Gordon for $110.3 million.

— Chris Malone Méndez