Portman Industrial Launches Distribution Campus

Campus 4A. Image courtesy of Frampton Construction Co.

Portman Industrial has begun construction on Campus 4A, a three-building, 940,000-square-foot warehouse/distribution development at Camp Hall commerce park in Ridgeville, S.C. The project’s general contractor is Frampton Construction Co. LLC.

READ ALSO: While Supply Chain Slows, Logistics Real Estate Moves Fast: Report

Portman recently purchased the 77-acre Campus 4A site from Exeter Property Group. The location is adjacent to Volvo Cars’ manufacturing plant at Fish Road and Volvo Cars Drive, has easy access to I-26 and is 30 minutes from the Port of Charleston.

Of the three facilities in phase one, Buildings A and B are about 220,000 square feet each, with a rear-loading layout, 32-foot clear heights, 36 dock doors and two drive-in doors. Building C is about 500,000 square feet with a cross-dock layout, 36-foot clear height, 116 dock doors and four drive-in doors.

The project is set to be completed in the fourth quarter of 2022.

Portman has engaged Lee Allen and Kevin Coats from JLL Charleston as the listing agents, Seamon Whiteside as civil engineer, and McMillan Pazdan Smith as lead architect for Phase I.

Portman also recently purchased the remaining 110 acres of the Campus 4 site from Santee Cooper, South Carolina’s state-owned public power provider and lead designer of Camp Hall, and is planning additional buildings there. Camp Hall totals about 6,800 acres, of which 2,600 acres will be preserved.

Supply chain upheaval

In a prepared statement, John Gaskin, Portman Industrial’s Southeast regional manager, said, “Campus 4 provides us with the ability to target a diversity of tenants,” whether they’re seeking “smaller, single-load facilities that have been the hallmark of Charleston’s tenant demand” or larger cross-dock logistics facilities of roughly 500,000 to 1 million square feet, which are in short supply in the Charleston area.

Just about every size of distribution space seems to be in high demand in metro Charleston, which has an overall vacancy of 2.4 percent, according to a third-quarter report from local CRE firm Bridge Commercial.

Part of the impetus behind this, the company says, is that diminished reliability in the supply chain is causing a wide range of manufacturers to hold significantly more inventory than they have in recent years.

Bridge also notes that the Charleston-area market is seeing forward sales, that is, purchases by investors of speculative industrial buildings before they’re leased and “based on hypothetical tenants and future cap rates.”

Last December, a 448,765-square-foot industrial campus in Summerville, S.C., sold for $55 million.