Rexford Spends $210M on LA Warehouse

9400 Santa Fe Springs Road. Image courtesy of CommercialEdge

Rexford Industrial Realty Inc. has acquired a 595,304-square-foot industrial property in Los Angeles County for $210 million. CommercialEdge data shows that the former owner of the fully leased asset is the San Diego County Employees Retirement Association, an entity that purchased the warehouse in 2015 for $62.3 million.

Located at 9400 Santa Fe Springs Road on 22.4 acres in the Mid-Counties submarket, the facility is occupied by two tenants. Rexford described the area as “demonstrating an extreme scarcity of similar size and quality available product.”

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In a prepared statement, Rexford Co-CEOs Howard Schwimmer and Michael Frankel referenced the REIT’s $50 million pipeline of additional acquisitions under contract or accepted offer, as well as Rexford’s 9 million square feet of value-add repositioning and redevelopment projects.

Rexford’s focus is investing in, operating and redeveloping infill industrial properties throughout Southern California. Its portfolio currently comprises 368 properties totaling about 45.1 million rentable square feet. Most recently, Rexford leased an industrial facility in Orange County to an EV manufacturer.

Could be better

The metro Los Angeles economy will likely benefit from a recent agreement between the Pacific Maritime Association and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, gradually winning back pan-Pacific cargo traffic from the East Coast, according to a second-quarter report from Kidder Mathews.

Leasing deals are sluggish, the report stated, with overall vacancy creeping up to 3.3 percent. On the other hand, asking rents are holding steady at an average of $1.89, and lease renewals indicate that tenants generally prefer the status quo.

In Santa Fe Springs, there’s a total availability of 1.6 percent on an inventory of 53.7 million square feet and a small amount of net negative absorption year-to-date.

Kidder Mathews is guarded about the near-term outlook, indicating that although the port numbers should improve later this year, absorption trends and the quantity of industrial inventory point toward a slower pace of lease transactions.