LaSalle and Camber take Long Island industrial off the market

LaSalle Investment Management and Camber Real Estate Partners have formed a joint venture to acquire a three-building Long Island industrial portfolio of more than 270,000 square feet. The off-market sale was arranged by a JLL Capital Markets team led by Tyler Peck alongside Andrew Scandalios and John Huguenard, and no price was disclosed. That omission matters because the two firms are reporting square footage and tenant mix while offering nothing that would let an outsider compute a yield.

What the buyers are getting, on paper at least, is credit: two investment-grade tenants anchor the three properties, one in global logistics and one in national defense. Jeff Shuster, president of LaSalle Value Partners, described the acquisition as fitting a strategy of targeting infill industrial in supply-constrained markets with strong fundamentals, pointing to high barriers to entry, minimal new supply and proximity to one of the densest consumer populations in the country. The geography makes the argument on its own. The buildings touch the major Long Island expressways and the Southern State Parkway, with JFK and LaGuardia within reach, the kind of address where a landlord cannot build a competitor and a seller has no need to run a wide auction.

LaSalle's summer has run on that logic. In August the firm bought a 1.1 million-square-foot Subaru parts hub from a Prologis-Browning joint venture and recapitalized a 1.5 million-square-foot Houston office campus that was 98% leased, two deals in two sectors that turned on tenancy. Office trades are clearing on occupancy, not on rents, and the Long Island portfolio applies that standard where the demand case is considerably less contested.

A credit-anchored warehouse portfolio in a market that cannot add supply is a reasonable place to sit out the industrial rent-growth debate, and buying it off-market means never having to hand a seller a public benchmark to shop. Both sides preferring silence on price is the ordinary explanation for an undisclosed basis, which leaves outsiders reading the deal through the tenants and the land. This publication reported the portfolio as fully leased earlier in September, suggesting the income is already in place rather than being underwritten forward.

The tenancy worth watching is the defense side. A logistics tenant's credit tracks consumer demand, while a national-security tenant's tracks procurement, and infill buildings ringed by a dense population with no room to add supply are where that tenancy is least likely to need to go elsewhere. If LaSalle and Camber keep assembling properties anchored by defense tenants, the credit line stops being a tenant detail and becomes the strategy.