Ares fund pays $55M for Tacoma newspaper-turned-warehouse

Corebridge Real Estate Investors and Davis Property & Investment announced the $55 million sale of Tacoma Central Logistics, a 248,033-square-foot distribution building at 1950 S. State Street, to an Ares Real Estate fund, according to Connect CRE. The price works out to roughly $222 a square foot, or about $4.2 million an acre on the site's roughly 13 acres, and it lands on a building that has already been converted and fully leased.

The building's route to that state began in 1974, when the Tacoma News Tribune's headquarters and printing facility was constructed. The joint venture acquired it in 2021 and redeveloped it into an institutional-quality distribution center completed in 2023, a conversion that produced a 100 percent lease to Moose Toys, an Australian-founded global toy company, under a long-term tenant commitment. Marq Logistics will manage the property, and CBRE represented the joint venture, with Bret Hartzell and Charles Safley leading the team.

What Ares is buying is the post-conversion asset: a stabilized, single-tenant distribution building with the redevelopment risk already retired. The sale was announced only after completion and after the tenant commitment. Corebridge and Davis executed the value-add development and lease-up strategy that the sale price now capitalizes.

The deal is a compact version of the trade this publication has been tracking: the income statement is where value gets made, and then it gets sold. In Tacoma, the sellers took the vacancy risk of a 1970s newspaper building, and the buyer is paying for the cash flow that replaced it. At $55 million, that distinction is the whole deal.