LaSalle and Camber buy a fully leased Long Island industrial portfolio that can't be replaced

LaSalle Investment Management and New Jersey-based Camber Real Estate Partners have formed a joint venture, IREI reports, to acquire a three-building industrial portfolio on Long Island totaling more than 270,000 square feet. Struck off market and fully leased, the portfolio changes hands with two investment-grade tenants in the global logistics and national defense sectors carrying the rent roll; financial terms and exact addresses are undisclosed.

The acquisition sits inside LaSalle Value Partners' program of buying infill industrial where new supply cannot easily arrive, and president Jeff Shuster makes the case for Long Island in exactly those terms: one of the nation's most competitive, supply-constrained logistics corridors, with high barriers to entry, minimal new construction, and proximity to one of the densest consumer populations in the country. The venture is paying, Shuster says, "an attractive basis below replacement cost," with "meaningful opportunity for value creation" as the partners execute their business plan.

Camber's managing principal, Christopher Bellapianta, reads the same buildings from the income side, pointing to "a rare balance of credit-backed income stability and long-term asset strength." The two investment-grade names supply that stability, and at a fully leased closing, the rent roll is the portfolio's floor.

Below replacement cost carries unusual weight in a market where replacement is effectively theoretical: infill industrial land on Long Island is hemmed in by geography and entitlements, so the basis is a discount to a build nobody can actually undertake. The meaningful gain has to come later, when the tenants' leases run and the joint venture re-lets at whatever rents scarcity then supports—a leasing event, not a construction event—and the announcement does not date it.

Occupancy-first buying has been LaSalle's pattern across late summer: August brought the fully leased 1.1 million-square-foot Subaru hub, a build-to-suit anchoring the automaker's national parts network, and the recapitalization of the 98 percent-leased CityWest office campus in Houston. Long Island extends the same template to the supply side, with scarcity of land doing the pricing work that falling cap rates once did, and the off-market nature of this deal likely kept the competition thin—probably how the basis arrived below replacement in the first place.

The partners left the price private, so the deal resists outside benchmarking; the disclosed deck—full occupancy, two investment-grade tenants, and a market that cannot be built around—will have to stand in for the numbers. It is a conservative way to hold a scarce asset. Whether it is also a profitable one will be written at renewal, when infill rents meet the investment-grade roll.