Exclusive: MetLife, Panattoni Buy 250-acre Industrial Park in Lancaster
Thursday, December 10th 2015
DALLAS, TX – An investment partnership between MetLife Real Estate Investors and Panattoni Development Co. LLC has landed a rare opportunity in southern Dallas County: A 250-acre master-planned industrial park in Lancaster.
The tract has been under contract a number of times by other investors, but it took the partnership working with the land owner to complete the deal, saidTerry Darrow, managing director of JLL and longtime North Texas industrial broker.
“This is a big deal,” Darrow told the Dallas Business Journal in an exclusive interview. “We aren’t going to dive in with a speculative building, but we can do any reiteration of size including a 1.6-million-square-foot building.”
JLL’s Darrow, Kurt Griffin and Nathan Orbin are leasing and marketing the industrial park — called MidPoint Logistics Center — on behalf of MetLife and Panattoni.
MidPoint Logistics Center isn’t the first project for joint-venture partners MetLife and Panattoni. Since 2014, MetLife and Panattoni have invested in 14 joint-venture projects totaling more than 8.8 million square feet of space throughout the United States.
“At this point, we’ve truly refined our programmatic investment strategy to ensure that our joint ventures are successful from day one,” Panattoni Development Partner Rob Riner said.
Riner said the venture’s goal with MidPoint Logistics Center is to develop first-class properties that will remain relevant in the future.
Plans for the multiphase, built-to-suit industrial park include four buildings totaling 3.9 million square feet of industrial space with the ability to accommodate tenants ranging from 340,000 square feet to 1.6 million square feet.
To date, the biggest industrial building in North Texas is the $55 million, 1.4 million-square-foot Procter & Gamble Co. distribution center near Interstate 20 in Wilmer. If built, a 1.6 million-square-foot industrial building would become the largest in the region.
Even though there isn’t a 1.6 million-square-foot deal circling in North Texas, Darrow said, “It’s rare, but, when it comes, we have the land available to do it.”
In Dallas-Fort Worth, there are 16 big industrial deals looking for more than 500,000 square feet of space, totaling 15.2 million square feet of deals, according to JLL research.