Florida’s Largest Warehouse Commands $127M

Keystone Distribution Center. Image courtesy of Cushman & Wakefield

IP Capital Partners, of Boca Raton, Fla., and Torchlight Investors, of New York, have acquired Florida Keystone Distribution Center, a 1.9 million-square-foot warehouse in Ocala, Fla., for $126.5 million.

Cushman & Wakefield arranged the sale and secured $102 million in acquisition financing through PIMCO on behalf of the buyers.

The seller was Reich Brothers, of White Plains, N.Y., which specializes in repurposing underutilized industrial assets.

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The property features 36-foot clear ceilings, 150 dock-high and seven drive-in loading doors, 2,402 trailer parking spaces, an ESFR fire sprinkler system and full air-conditioning.

Florida Keystone Distribution Center is at 655 S.W. 52nd Ave., near the I-75/Highway 40 interchange and Ocala International Airport. It was built in 1990 and sits on a 169-acre site, according to information provided by CommercialEdge.

The property is Florida’s largest industrial warehouse and is fully leased to Costco-Innovel and Transformco. Innovel is the last-mile logistics provider that Costco acquired last year from Sears’ holding company for about $1 billion.

Cushman & Wakefield’s Mike Davis, Adam Spies, Rick Brugge, Rick Colon, Kevin Donner and Dominic Montazemi, with assistance by Zach Eicholtz and Brooke Tulley, represented the seller.

Jason Hochman, Brian Linnihan, Michael Ryan and Ron Granite of Cushman & Wakefield’s Equity, Debt and Structured Finance team represented the buyer with respect to the financing.

Ocala has emerged as one of the premier statewide distribution locations for Florida, Davis said in a prepared statement. He added that this property “has significantly below market rents providing the investor future upside upon rollover.”

Big deals, strong growth

Another sizable warehouse traded in Ocala last year, when Lexington Realty Trust acquired the 617,000-square-foot Florida Crossroads Logistics Center for $58 million from a joint venture led by Redrock Developments and Wharton Industrial.

More recently, Intercontinental Realty paid $106 million to purchase a 710,900-square-foot distribution center in Lakeland, Fla., in April. The property, Dragstrip Logistics Center, was sold by the developer, Ackerman & Co., and is fully leased to Amazon.

The Central Florida industrial market saw strong growth in the second quarter, with absorption of about 4.1 million square feet, as unemployment in the region continues to drop, according to a report from Newmark. Meanwhile about 7.0 million square feet of industrial space was delivered in the past 12 months, yet overall vacancy decreased by 40 basis points.