Prologis Sells Twin Cities Industrial Portfolio for $285M+

May 28, 2024

Investment Industrial Midwest Minneapolis-St PaulMoreNews

EQT Exeter acquired assets totaling more than 5 million square feet.

Arbor Lakes Business Park building — One of the assets that changed hands in this deal, part of Arbor Lakes Business Park. *Image courtesy of CommercialEdge*

Multiple limited liability companies affiliated with EQT Exeter have acquired a roughly 5.1 million-square-foot industrial portfolio in metro Minneapolis-St. Paul, public records show. Prologis sold the assets with the assistance of CBRE.

The portfolio totals 24 properties but sales documents currently mention only 14 assets having changed hands for a combined $284.6 million. The deal’s total dollar value was not disclosed and the entire transaction is expected to close during the second quarter of this year.

CBRE’s Judd Welliver confirmed the sale, but was unable to provide further information to Commercial Property Executive. Welliver worked together with Bentley Smith, Michael Caprile, Ryan Bain, Zachary Graham, Joseph Horrigan and Victoria Gomez in representing the seller, according to the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal.

The properties are part of four Minneapolis logistics submarkets and provide access to the I-494/I-694 beltway around the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area. The facilities were 90 percent leased at the time of sale by 54 unique tenants, approximately 20 percent of the total being existing tenants within EQT Exeter’s portfolio.

Two of the traded assets, totaling 541,622 square feet, are part of Arbor Lakes Business Park, an 100-acre campus in Maple Grove, Minn., according to CommercialEdge information. Developed by Duke Realty, both facilities came online in 2018 and entered Prologis’ portfolio in 2022, following the two firms’ merger.

The acquisition of Duke Realty by Prologis for $26 billion was first announced in June 2022. Multiple industry observers were quick to weigh in on the deal.

The all-stock transaction closed in early October of that year and ultimately valued at $23 billion. What Prologis gained was Duke’s full investment, management and development portfolio totaling 142 million square feet across 480 buildings, in addition to a development pipeline of 7 million square feet.

EQT Exeter, too, is committed to the industrial sector. Last July, it closed its Industrial Value Fund VI at $4.9 billion, well past its original goal of $4 billion.

Soft landing?

Although the nation’s industrial real estate sector is tapering off after two years of “unprecedented growth coming out of the pandemic,” and tenant demand—though positive—is also slowing, the sector’s outlook is largely good, according to a first-quarter report from Cushman & Wakefield.

Deliveries continue to outpace net absorption, but the overall nationwide vacancy of 5.8 percent remains under the long-term average of 7 percent, and rents continue to grow, albeit more moderately.

Equally good, construction starts are about half of what they were a year prior, in large because of interest rates. Tallying all the pluses and minuses, Cushman & Wakefield concludes, “Demand is cooling but not crashing, while vacancy is rising but at a controlled pace (largely due to new supply) and rent growth is slowing but solidly positive. This is exactly what a soft landing looks like for the industrial sector.”