Layline Buys Industrial Building in Hayward for $20M

Layline and an unidentified private equity firm have picked up a 22,700-square-foot industrial building in Hayward for $20.1 million.

The newly formed Oakland-based investment firm bought the 6.7-acre industrial property at 2348 Industrial Parkway West, the San Francisco Business Times reported. The seller was an affiliate of UPS, based in Atlanta.

Broker Craig Hagglund of Lee & Associates represented the UPS affiliate in the deal, which works out to $885 per square foot, or $3 million per acre.

The purchase comes five months after Layline bought a 20,000-square-foot warehouse on 3 acres from UPS in a sale-leaseback deal in Sunnyvale for $15.1 million.

Layline will now seek a new tenant for its vacant Hayward building, Drew Hess, a co-founder of Layline, told the Business Times. He said the property falls within the industrial outdoor storage category because of its large, paved yard.

The category, which typically includes surface-parked industrial assets on between 2 and 10 acres, has gained popularity with investors.

“It took a while for people to learn how to value them,” Hess told the newspaper of the former trucking facility.

Layline, founded early this year by Hess and Mark English, aims to serve as a channel for private capital to invest in industrial properties, unlike the publicly traded industrial real estate investment trusts that have historically dominated the Bay Area industrial market.

English said it plans to renovate the 52-year-old Hayward building near Interstate 880 and the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge.

Availability in the 93.6 million-square-foot Oakland metro industrial market, which includes Hayward, was 4.49 percent in the third quarter, up from 3.3 percent in the first quarter, according to CBRE.

— Dana Bartholomew