Rexford Industrial Expands LA Portfolio

14100 Vine Place, Cerritos, Calif.

Rexford Industrial Realty Inc. continues its highly acquisitive period with the recent purchase of 14100 Vine Place, an approximately 119,100-square-foot facility in Cerritos, Calif., roughly 20 mile southeast of downtown Los Angeles. On the heels of a series of other acquisitions, the REIT acquired the lightly marketed property from Milieu Park LLC in a transaction valued at $48.5 million.

Located on an approximately 8-acre site, 14100 Vine first opened its doors in 1979. Today the building is home to a single tenant that occupies the space under a short-term lease that gives Rexford the opportunity to implement a repositioning program upon expiration.

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14100 Vine Place, Cerritos, Calif.

“When we buy assets, we are targeting the best locations in the market, and these are very large and deep markets as you know. And further, if they’re not the most functional in the submarket when we acquire them…as soon as we can drive the opportunity or vacancy, we proactively renovate and reposition to make them the most functional in the submarket, and so we are positioned to out-compete both from a location perspective and from a functionality perspective,” Michael Frankel, co-CEO of Rexford Industrial Realty Inc., said during the company’s third quarter 2021 earnings call on October 21.

Rexford’s transformation of 14100 Vine will include the addition of dock-high loading and the paving of excess land to create outdoor storage capacity. The renovations will likely be well received in Cerritos, where the vacancy rate in the third quarter was just 0.6 percent and the positive net absorption was the highest of all 10 cities in the Mid-Counties submarket, according to a report by CBRE.

Los Angeles-area buying binge

Rexford announced the of 14100 Vine Place purchase along with news of other transactions in October and November, including the acquisition of four other assets in separate deals. The REIT invested $19 million in the purchase of 21515 Western Ave., a 56,200-square-foot retail building sited on 4 acres of industrial land in Los Angeles’ South Bay submarket of Torrance, Calif. The company plans to transform the structure into an 85,500-square-foot warehouse and distribution facility.

The REIT also bought 12027 Greenstone Ave., an $8.1 million, 2.3-acre industrial outdoor storage site located across from two of Rexford’s storage facilities in Santa Fe Springs, and 6027 Eastern Ave. in Commerce, a $23.3 million, 3.9-acre site that will be transformed into two state-of-the-art warehouse distribution buildings totaling 92,800 square feet.

The only recently announced addition to Rexford’s portfolio that is not part of the Greater Los Angeles area is a property that is part of perhaps the tightest market in the country, the Inland Empire. In an off-market transaction, the REIT acquired 340-344 Bonnie Circle, a 98,000-square-foot building on 5.2 acres of land in Corona, in a $27 million transaction.

In 2021, Rexford has closed approximately $1.4 billion of investments in Southern California year-to-date. And with an additional $300 million of acquisitions currently under contract or in the accepted offer phase, there’s every reason to believe that the REIT will complete millions more in transactions before year’s end.