March 2, 2021 – Chicago, IL – Avison Young today announced that it has negotiated the sale of a 587,720 square foot (sf) institutional quality industrial property at 537 Omni Industrial Boulevard in Summerville, SC, in the Charleston market. The building was built in 2018 and is fully leased to 3G Distribution Services, a third-party logistics provider.
Avison Young directors Erik Foster and Mike Wilson, members of the company’s National Industrial Capital Markets Group, were hired to represent the seller, Clarius Partners LLC, a full-service real estate development and investment company, along with its partner Wanxiang America Real Estate Group, a Chicago-based real estate investment company. Foster and Wilson also successfully raised development assets on behalf of Clarius in order to start the project.
The buyer was an institutional real estate venture capital firm.
“After increasing the development assets for Clarius and then concluding the sale, it was a pleasure to work on this project until its completion. This state-of-the-art facility checked all the boxes from an investment perspective and attracted a strong response from capital sources around the world, ”said Foster, who heads the company’s National Industrial Capital Market Group. “These types of fully leased assets in strong logistics markets will continue to be in demand due to their ability to support the growth of e-commerce, logistics and the manufacturing sector.”
Class A facilities are located on 43 acres within the Omni Industrial Campus, a 221-acre master planned business park that offers proximity to the Port of Charleston and direct access to I-26, the region’s main transportation route. The park is at the heart of the growing south-east manufacturing corridor, which has attracted global companies like Daimler, Boeing, Volvo and Cummins.
The Charleston industrial market has seen significant demand in recent years due to its low tax structure and connectivity to the port and major transportation corridors in the United States. According to Avison Young research, the South Carolina Ports Authority (SCPA) is preparing for the opening in March 2021 of a new container terminal in North Charleston, which will initially add capacity to move another 700,000 cargo containers of 20 foot. The average number of containers handled at the port has almost doubled in the last decade and the SCPA ended 2020 with its strongest December ever recorded. The cargo numbers reflected an increase of 11.6% in the handling of containers equivalent to twenty feet.
The Charleston market, which has become an international center for high technology, commercial services and automotive and aerospace manufacturing, is among the top 15 for general US export activity. Last year, Wal-Mart, A&R Logistics and Frontier Logistics signed lease agreements for more than 500,000 square feet in the Charleston market.