Walton Street Capital Buys 1 MSF Savannah Warehouse

1004 Gateway Pkwy. Image courtesy of JLL

The Broe Group has sold 1004 Gateway Parkway, a 998,472-square-foot Class A industrial asset outside Savannah, Ga., to Walton Street Capital. The fully leased property is the first facility to open within the 2,700-acre Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub. JLL represented the seller and secured financing.

The property broke ground in late 2019, delivering in December 2020, according to CommercialEdge data. The cross-dock facility has 36-foot clear heights, 43 loading docks and 185-foot truck courts. The building also benefits from access via OmniTRAX to two railways—one operated by CSX, the other by Norfolk Southern.

The JLL team working with the seller included Britton Burdette, Dennis Mitchell, Matt Wirth and Jim Freeman. The brokerage’s Bobby Norwood and Mark Sixour arranged the financing.

The distribution center’s two tenants are logistics firm Quantix and vacuum cleaner manufacturer Bissell Homecare. Both companies occupy the building under triple net lease agreements.

The facility is located within a designated Foreign Trade Zone in Rincon, Ga., 12 miles north of the Port of Savannah’s Garden City Terminal. Traffic within the port has grown considerably, with monthly TEU throughput up nearly 9 percent from October 2020 to October 2021, data from the Georgia Ports Authority indicates. The port is set to begin a major, $205 million expansion to further increase the facility’s container capacity by one-fifth, Savannah Morning News reported earlier this year.

Investment, development take flight

Broe’s sale comes on the heels of several other notable industrial deals in the Savannah area. In March, Invesco Real Estate paid $92 million for a 1.1 million-square-foot distribution center just 3 miles southeast, CommercialEdge data shows.

At the same time, development has risen to a fever pitch: In November, 14.7 million square feet of industrial projects was underway. While smaller in scope compared to construction activity in major industrial hubs such as Dallas and the Inland Empire, the market’s active pipeline accounts for nearly 20 percent of inventory, one of the highest rates nationwide.