Logistics Property Co. Closes $1B Industrial Real Estate Fund

CityPark Logistics Center, Missouri City, Texas. Image courtesy of Logistics Property Co.

Logistics Property Co. LLC has closed its develop-to-core fund, LPC Logistics Venture One LP, with total equity commitments of $1 billion from several global institutional investors.

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The company noted that about 90 percent of the fund has already been allocated, with substantial investments in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Seattle, and Pocono, Pa. LPC’s primary target markets also include Baltimore, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, Seattle, and the New Jersey/Pennsylvania corridor.

The successful capital raise “speaks to the confidence global investors have in the industrial sector’s strong underlying fundamentals” and also evidences their confidence in LPC’s ability to “identify attractive risk-adjusted return development opportunities, and execute our develop-to-core strategy across a portfolio of state-of-the-art, logistics assets,” LPC’s CEO Jim Martell said in a prepared statement.

Martell told Commercial Property Executive that “develop-to-core” is LPC’s strategy to develop new ground-up projects and hold them for a number of years, allowing their investors to “obtain solid NOI returns at a basis 15 to 25 percent below buying core assets.”

MIRA Real Estate, part of Macquarie Group and LPC’s majority shareholder, acted as the fund’s exclusive financial advisor and placement agent and partnered with the LPC management team in forming the platform. MIRA Real Estate is part of Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets, one of the world’s leading alternative asset managers.

A busy year, despite everything

In May, LPC announced the imminent groundbreaking on its third building at Southport Logistics Park, in Wilmer, Texas, in the DFW Metroplex. The speculative Class A building will total about 1 million square feet, expandable to 1.2 million, on completion in the second quarter of 2021.

Other active LPC projects include CityPark Logistics Park, a 97-acre development in southwest metro Houston that will eventually encompass seven buildings totaling 1.7 million square feet. The three-building first phase, totaling 454,000 square feet, was scheduled for delivery this quarter.

As of August, the company had so far this year secured seven construction loans (from as many lenders) aggregating $187 million for industrial developments in Illinois, Texas, Washington, Georgia and Pennsylvania.