1788 Holdings pays $15M for 103,000-square-foot Capitol Heights industrial building

An investment affiliate of 1788 Holdings has acquired 51 Ritchie Road, a single-story light industrial building of nearly 103,000 square feet in Capitol Heights, Prince George’s County, Maryland, for $15 million, as Connect CRE reported. The price works out to a little over $145 a square foot for a building delivered in the mid-1950s and renovated in the mid-1970s and again in 1997, with 18- to 22-foot clear ceiling heights, 11 drive-in doors, and three dock doors.

The site runs to nearly eight acres, two of them industrial outside storage land, and it comes fully occupied by Bay Crane Mid-Atlantic, which leases the entire building. The tenant was formed after Bay Crane Companies’ 2024 acquisition of United Crane & Rigging and Crane Rental Company, a combination the outlet calls one of the largest crane companies operating in the Mid-Atlantic.

A crane operator explains the shape of the building better than a logistics tenant would. Eleven drive-in doors against three dock doors is a service-yard ratio; the paved lot and the two acres of outside storage are where the fleet sits when it is not on a job. Single-tenant industrial in this size band usually trades on the credit behind the rent; here that credit traces to a platform assembled from two acquired crane businesses in 2024, which suggests the buyer is underwriting the yard, and the difficulty of replacing it nearby, alongside the lease.

CBRE’s Matt Laraway and Luke Wilson represented the seller, whom the coverage does not name; 1788 represented itself. The buyer is privately owned and, by its own description in the report, manages a national commercial portfolio spanning 13 states with a market value above $250 million, which puts the purchase at roughly 6 percent of that stated total and the trade at about $1.9 million an acre, building included.

Our September reporting on the Mid-Atlantic found entitlement rather than power had become the binding constraint, though that work concerned data center sites. A 1950s box with an operating tenant and a paved yard needs no new approvals to collect its rent, and infill industrial in Prince George’s County does not sit behind the review queue that governs larger campuses.

The report does not say how much lease term remains, who the seller was, or what yield the deal cleared at. The first of those carries the most weight: a crane fleet is expensive to relocate, and a long remaining term is what lets a buyer treat the yard’s replacement cost as collateral.