Stockbridge Buys 1.2 MSF Industrial Asset Near Charleston
A global car manufacturer occupies the entire facility.
Stockbridge has acquired Building D at Camp Hall Commerce Center, Campus 4, a 1.2 million-square-foot industrial property in Ridgeville, S.C.
Portman Industrial and Rockpoint, a Boston-based real estate private equity firm, sold the asset with the assistance of JLL.
Completed only last year, Building D can accommodate high-volume distribution operations and features 40-foot clear height, a cross-dock loading configuration, 208 dock-high doors, four drive-in doors and 84 dock levelers. There are 847 auto parking spaces and 804 trailer storage spaces. Volvo occupies the entire warehouse supporting the car manufacturer’s nearby factory.
Located at 2274 Volvo Car Drive, Building D has access to Interstate 26 and is 36 miles northwest of Charleston, S.C. The facility is within the 6,800-acre Camp Hall, a master-planned industrial park in Berkeley County being developed by Santee Cooper, South Carolina’s state-owned electric and water utility.
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Stockbridge has about $33.6 billion of assets under management across the major property types, with an emphasis on U.S. residential and industrial assets. This spring, the company purchased a two-property, 540,478-square-foot Class A industrial portfolio in Southern California’s Inland Empire from Principal Asset Management for $142.3 million.
The JLL Investment Sales and Advisory team represented Portman Industrial and Rockpoint in the sale to Stockbridge.
Big names at the master-planned industrial park
Camp Hall is home to Volvo Car USA’s first U.S. manufacturing plant, which opened in 2018. In 2022, EV battery recycler Redwood Materials announced a $3.5 billion project at Camp Hall, which broke ground in early 2024.
DC Blox, a specialist in Tier III data centers, connectivity services and dark fiber, acquired 27.5 acres at Camp Hall in July 2023. The company plans to develop a multi-tenant data center on the site.
Palmetto Railways is also building a nearly 23-mile line from the Camp Hall Commerce Park to a connection with a CSX line near a Santee Cooper power generating station in Cross, S.C. The $185 million rail project, which will improve the park’s connectivity, will be completed by 2026.
Charleston industrial still suffers hangover from boom
Charleston, a port industrial market, had a vacancy rate of 17 percent in the third quarter of 2024, according to a JLL report. This is a consequence of ballooning supply as developers in the early 2020s anticipated higher post-pandemic demand which didn’t pan out in the climate of rising interest rates and uncertain business conditions.
As recently as 2022, the market’s vacancy was around 2.0 percent, the same report shows. That year, about 6 million square feet of space came online, while there was demand for more than 7 million. In 2023 however, the situation reversed. Supply was more than 7 million square feet, but demand had shrunk to about 4 million.
On the other hand, JLL points out, the current vacancy is concentrated, with only 10 percent of buildings market-wide in greater Charleston representing 93 percent of the vacancy, driven by changes in tenant trends. Smaller buildings are attracting more users, significantly outpacing larger ones.
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