IDS, Clarion Buy 70 Acres in Suburban Seattle for Industrial Park

By Barbra Murray, Contributing Editor 

Dayton Conklin, of Clarion

IDS Real Estate Group and Clarion Partners have just acquired a 70-acre site in Kent, Wash., for the development of Stryker Business Center at Pacific Gateway, an industrial complex that will encompass as much as 1.5 million square feet of premier space. The partners acquired the land, located just 15 miles south of Seattle, from Boeing.

“We embarked on this project because the fundamentals of the market were compelling,” Dayton Conklin, senior vice president at Clarion Partners, told Commercial Property Executive. “Seattle has the fifth lowest industrial property vacancy rate in the U.S. and employment there is growing at twice the national average.”

IDS and Clarion are wasting little time moving forward with the spec project. The team will break ground on the first phase, which will deliver two warehouse distribution facilities totaling 438,000 square feet, this spring. Forty-five acres of the land will be reserved for build-to-suit developments encompassing as much as 900,000 square feet in one or more structures. “The property’s unbeatable central location will offer tenants easy access to businesses throughout the region,” Dan Sibson, senior vice president at IDS, said, speaking to CPE. “We analyzed all these factors and strongly believe that the timing is right to break ground on a new facility.” Commercial real estate services firm Jones Lang LaSalle has been tapped to guide the marketing of Stryker.

The national real estate market has certainly improved but spec developments are not the order of the day just yet. However, in the Puget Sound area, demand is on the rise among both small and large users, the latter of which have to struggle to find large blocks of state-of-the-art industrial space, as noted in a fourth quarter report by JLL.

“The Seattle metro area has seen healthy employment growth in the past year, particularly in aerospace manufacturing, e-commerce and construction which is driving the demand for industrial product, especially in the Southend markets,” Scott Carter, managing director with JLL, told CPE. “Also, the popularity and economic diversity of the Puget Sound region is motivating population growth in the area which has historically been a catalyst for industrial development as demand increases for manufactured goods and services. We expect these trends to continue in the near and mid-term, as the economy returns to more sustained growth.”

The first phase of Stryker is on schedule to deliver by the end of 2013, but businesses that are eager to set up shop in the new park will not necessarily have to wait, as the site is home to an existing 125,000-square-foot office building.