Amazon Warehouse in Brooklyn Scores $155M Recap

280 Richards St. Renderings courtesy of Newmark

Thor Equities’ industrial project in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood is moving forward. Located at 280 Richards St., the Amazon-preleased warehouse received a $155 million joint-venture recap provided by a foreign entity, along with a $76 million construction loan.

Last November, the e-commerce giant signed a long-term, full-building prelease agreement for the upcoming 312,100-square-foot distribution center facing the Upper New York Bay.

Thor purchased the land in 2005. The owner’s initial plans, dubbed Red Hoek Point, proposed a nearly 800,000-square-foot office development with additional retail space, designed by Foster + Partners. In early 2019, Thor shifted toward an industrial approach and announced plans for the last-mile warehouse facility, according to multiple media sources.

The 7.7-acre site is adjacent to an IKEA store covering 346,000 square feet, that opened in mid-2008. At the time, the Swedish furniture maker’s move steered up controversy considering that a development of its scale was bound to create traffic gridlock in the historic neighborhood. Amazon’s 20-year lease at the location further sustains the trend to revitalize the underused, well-positioned waterfront sites in the area.

Newmark’s Jordan Roeschlaub, Dustin Stolly, Nick Scribani, Kevin Walsh, Brian Schulz and Brett Siegel arranged the recapitalization for the owner, while Roeschlaub, Stolly, Scribani and Dominick Calisto closed on the fixed rate senior construction financing, provided by Apollo Bank.

Amazon’s upcoming New York warehouses

The single-story facility will encompass 130,200 rentable square feet of distribution space, 21,300 square feet of office and utilities space, as well as 160,600 square feet of rooftop parking. The building will offer 28 loading docks, a 128-foot truck court, along with 157 street-level parking spaces, while an engineered parking deck above the warehouse can accommodate 234 fleet vehicles such as vans and box trucks. The owner tapped March Construction, Ware Malcomb and DeSimone to deliver the project.

Amazon has another New York City-area warehouse in the construction pipeline. Last June, the e-commerce company inked a 1.1 million-square-foot lease with LBA Logistics and RXR Realty at their multi-story distribution center in Queens, set to deliver in December 2022.

In 2019, New York City-based Thor Equities ventured into the life sciences sector, with the launch of its new Thor Sciences division. The commitment was sealed with the concomitant $152 million purchase of a New Jersey life science campus. Last March, Thor added another asset to its new platform with the purchase of the 337,888-square-foot Liberty Innovation Center in Jersey City, N.J.