Griffin Partners to Build 2 MSF Warehouse Project

Earhart Industrial Park. Image courtesy of Griffin Partners

Griffin Partners has started site work on Earhart Industrial Park, a speculative two-warehouse industrial project totaling 2 million square feet in Lebanon, Tenn.

The development off Interstate 840 and Highway 109 will be the largest industrial project in Nashville’s I-840 bulk industrial corridor when completed in the third quarter of 2024.

The first cross-dock building will have 863,573 square feet and 367 car parking spaces and 196 trailer spots. The second building will have nearly 1.2 million square feet and room for 448 cars and 284 trailers. Both warehouses will be 640 feet deep with a 40-foot clear height. There is land for development at the site, where the developer is considering adding more than 300 trailer parking spaces.

The site is fairly hilly, with more than 1 million cubic yards of earth being moved to prepare site for the two large warehouses. Griffin is estimating it will take nine months for the initial site work for the project.

Travis Covington, president of development at Griffin Partners, said in a prepared statement the company has tapped Foundry Commercial’s Industrial Services team out of Nashville to serve as leasing broker and bring the right tenant mix to Earhart Industrial Park.

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The team consists of Melissa Alexander, SIOR, W.B. Scoggin, CCIM, Casey Flannery and Warren Snowdon, SIOR.

Alexander, a partner at Foundry Commercial, said in prepared remarks there currently are no vacant buildings in the Lebanon industrial corridor, where most of the Nashville region’s bulk product exists, to accommodate tenants that need substantial square footage. She added Earhart is the first fully capitalized warehouse park coming out of the ground during a time when construction starts have been slowed or stalled on similar projects in the area.

Earlier projects

Griffin, a commercial real estate investment firm based in Houston, has acquired, developed or managed more than 100 properties with an aggregate value of more than $2.5 billion over the last 40 years. Earhart is the Houston-based firm’s third industrial development in Tennessee. Griffin is also developing Saturn Crossing, two industrial buildings totaling more than 203,000 square feet, along Saturn Parkway in Spring Hill, Tenn., south of Nashville. In March 2022, Griffin completed and sold Park 109, which is a four-building, 375,000-square-foot industrial park on the east side of Nashville.

In the firm’s home state, Griffin broke ground on Port 45, a two-building industrial park totaling 567,526 square feet in Wilmer, Texas, in July 2022. The tilt-wall warehouses are rear-load facilities and located on approximately 40 acres along Interstate 45.

Foundry invests not only in industrial properties but also office, retail, multifamily, health-care and other asset classes. The firm’s development and investment platform is currently invested in more than $3.5 billion in joint ventures and has more than $1 billion in active ground-up developments across the Sun Belt.

In December, Foundry broke ground on South Florida Gateway Distribution Center in Stuart, Fla., a speculative two-building project that will have more than 983,000 square feet of space. It was the company’s third groundbreaking in less than two months and second in Florida. A month earlier, Foundry began construction of Creekside Logistics, an approximately 370,900-square-foot light industrial campus in Smyrna, Tenn., in partnership with Principal Real Estate. It is the company’s first in metro Nashville and will have three buildings when completed later this year.