LaSalle and Camber buy an off-market Long Island industrial portfolio

A joint venture of LaSalle Investment Management and Camber Real Estate Partners has bought a fully leased, roughly 270,000-square-foot Long Island industrial portfolio off-market, trading vacancy upside for the protection of owning buildings that would be costly to replace. The price was not disclosed; JLL Capital Markets' investment sales team arranged the sale.

The three buildings include a 46,000-square-foot facility near JFK Airport and two South Shore properties in Suffolk County measuring 100,230 and 124,500 square feet; Christopher Bellapianta, Camber's managing principal, described the portfolio as balancing credit-backed income with long-term asset strength, pointing to layouts and infill locations that should hold up in a supply-constrained market. Camber is a New Jersey-based operator whose 80-building, 4.5 million-square-foot portfolio is built around value-add infill light-industrial properties in select East Coast markets, while LaSalle, a JLL subsidiary, manages $86.6 billion globally.

The deal reads less like a value-add trade than a scarcity trade: at 100% occupancy, there is no vacant space for Camber's team to lease up, so the return has to come from contractual rent bumps and from owning buildings that would be costly to replace on constrained Long Island land. The occupancy-first logic runs through LaSalle's recent buying: the firm acquired a 1.1 million-square-foot Subaru distribution hub on Aug. 20 and recapitalized the 98%-leased Houston office campus at CityWest, a 1.5 million-square-foot asset, on Aug. 27.

Off-market execution suggests the buyer was paying for certainty over price discovery and the seller was getting a clean result without putting a leasing story out to bid. The dividing line for Camber comes later: credit-backed income makes the early years safe, but the portfolio's real upside sits in each lease rollover; if Long Island industrial supply stays as tight as the buyer's statement argues, those renewals will justify the quiet purchase, while if the market loosens, the same rollovers become negotiations.

The portfolio is a modest addition to LaSalle's global book, and no per-square-foot price will be published. Still, institutional capital is now willing to underwrite replacement cost in Long Island's constrained industrial corridor before it will underwrite vacancy — a defensible call while supply stays tight, and a stretched one if looser conditions meet those maturities.