Becknell hires LaSalle veteran to build its REIT selling group

Six months after Becknell Industrial launched its private, perpetual-life industrial income REIT, the hire that matters most has nothing to do with acquisitions: Chicago-based Becknell has named Russ A. Greenwald director of strategic partnerships, according to a press release, with a mandate to expand the selling group for Becknell Industrial Income Trust Inc., the vehicle it markets to accredited investors.

Bisnow first reported the appointment. Greenwald spent more than a decade at LaSalle Investment Management, where he helped build the selling group for JLL Income Property Trust, after senior roles at Mesirow Financial, Guggenheim Investments and Allstate Financial. The LaSalle credential is effectively a job description: Becknell is asking him to repeat, for a private industrial trust, the distribution build-out he did for another income-focused real asset product.

The SEC paperwork makes the capital plan concrete: in February Becknell filed to offer shares at a $25,000 minimum to accredited investors, with estimated gross proceeds of $10 million in the first twelve months, a figure that measures the build-out phase rather than an institutional raise. What gets the trust from that $10 million to a real pool is the number of wealth-management firms authorized to sell its shares, more than the portfolio or the property market.

Greenwald joins a sales team built for exactly that work, alongside two other announced hires — Eric Schilling as vice president of debt capital markets and Josie Peacock as director of investments and capital markets — a trio that suggests the firm is constructing a broader capital-markets platform around the trust rather than backfilling a single role.

Advisers are being sold an industrial thesis that has, at least on the supply side, moved in Becknell's favor: the Commercial Real Estate Development Association Research Foundation expects U.S. companies to absorb more than 114 million square feet of distribution and warehouse space in the first half, more than 150 million square feet in the second half of 2026, and another 245 million square feet next year, a pace the foundation attributes to data center capital spending and e-commerce growth even with higher interest rates.

Development is not matching that absorption. Builders added 75 million square feet in each of the first two quarters of 2026, the slowest pace of new development since early 2018, according to the same foundation, and that gap is the sales pitch.

Unlike a blind pool, the trust starts with an existing portfolio, which Becknell CFO Clay Thelen described in February as an income-focused vehicle managed by a team that has focused exclusively on industrial real estate for more than 35 years. Existing assets plus a tighter supply pipeline writes a cleaner story for advisers than a startup with nothing in the ground.

Greenwald's former employer is still buying the kind of assets the trust will hold: LaSalle and Camber bought a fully leased Long Island industrial portfolio last week, as this publication has tracked, another sign that the same fundamentals are drawing institutional capital into industrial.

The data-center thread matters beyond warehouses. The power and land scarcity already documented in the AI build-out now shows up in CREDA's warehouse forecast, where capital spending on data centers, not just online shopping, is the demand engine fueling industrial absorption. Selling a permanent vehicle into that tailwind is the right strategy; the execution risk sits in the selling group.

The portfolio already exists, and the $10 million first-year target is only the starting gate. What Becknell is still building is the list of advisers who can sell shares of it, the part of the balance sheet no warehouse can provide and the part that will determine whether that $10 million grows into a real pool.