CBRE to Manage 1 MSF Data Center Portfolio

By Tudor Scolca

The Plano, Texas, data center campus

Lincoln Rackhouse, the data center division of Lincoln Property Co., has hired CBRE to manage a 1 million-square-foot data center portfolio that spans three states. The company acquired the portfolio together with Principal Real Estate Investors earlier this year from a Fortune 500 entity, which leased back some of the inventory.

CBRE’s Data Center Solutions team will be responsible for day-to-day operations, maintenance and capital projects at the newly acquired facilities. The portfolio comprises three campuses situated in Kansas City, Mo., Dallas and Phoenix. The data centers have a combined IT power capacity of 28 megawatts, with expansions ready for deployment according to demand.

All three facilities are wholesale data centers. Previous ownership invested approximately $200 million to upgrade and renovate the campuses. Lincoln Rackhouse is planning to pour more funds into further improvements and retrofitting the data centers for multi-tenant use.

Top market presence

The regions where Lincoln Rackhouse expanded its operations are all premier data center markets in their own way. Dallas-Fort Worth is currently the second largest market in the U.S. by available inventory—around 268 megawatts are deployed in the region, according to CBRE’s Data Center Trends Report H1 2018. The campus is in the Dallas suburb of Plano and currently has 8 megawatts immediately available, with potential expansion to 16 megawatts.

The Phoenix data center market is growing at a quick pace, with many investors currently deploying raised floor space in the region. According to the same source, there are currently more than 61 megawatts of data center space under construction. The Lincoln-Principal joint venture’s newly acquired campus has a 10-megawatt capacity, which, together with a redundant substation of 21.6 megawatts, was fully leased by Internap Corp. immediately after the transaction.

“As for Kansas City, we now own the largest block of data center space currently available in the market, which historically has seen more data center development directly by the enterprise, due to a lack of large-scale wholesale data center offerings,” said Ryan Crabtree, vice president of asset management and property operations at Lincoln Rackhouse, in a prepared statement. The Kansas City campus is a two-building data center that totals 259,111 square feet and delivers up to 10 megawatts of critical power.

Image courtesy of Lincoln Rackhouse