Link Logistics sells Fort Lauderdale industrial campus for $57 million

Blackstone's industrial arm has sold a seven-building campus on Stirling Road in Fort Lauderdale for $57 million, a price that works out to roughly $271 a square foot across the 210,000-square-foot property and more than triple the $17.5 million the site last traded for in 2013, according to property records cited by Commercial Observer.

The buyers are BKM Capital Partners, an industrial specialist, and Boca Raton-based Kayne Anderson Real Estate, which picked up the small-bay buildings at 2201, 2301 and 2381 Stirling Road, less than a mile west of Interstate 95 and near the Dania Pointe retail complex. The campus, built in 1985 and 1987, runs 97 percent leased with a 3.9-year weighted average lease term, figures the buyers supplied. Cushman & Wakefield's Rick Brugge represented the seller, Blackstone affiliate Link Logistics. The coverage does not say when Blackstone acquired the asset, leaving the 2013 trade as the only known basis on the property.

BKM's Brett Turner, a partner and managing director of acquisitions and dispositions, said in a statement that a park like this could not be built today, let alone assembled along the I-95 corridor, and that the staggered expirations — with no single lease deciding the outcome — were what made the rent roll work.

The Fort Lauderdale trade is small money against the pace the joint venture has set. On Monday the pair announced $103 million for a four-property, 543,000-square-foot light industrial portfolio in Central Orlando, 95 percent leased; last month they paid $14 million for a 61,135-square-foot Fort Lauderdale asset; and in Southern California they spent $1.8 billion on 8.5 million square feet acquired from Link Logistics. Link is the counterparty at both ends of the country, and whether that reflects a deliberate culling of older, smaller assets from the largest industrial landlord's book or ordinary portfolio management is unclear.

There is a version of this trade the numbers support without strain. A 1985-vintage park, tenanted and rolling on staggered leases, prices off its in-place rent roll rather than replacement cost, which is the small-format echo of a construction freeze that this publication has followed in larger deals. BKM is buying the income stream, and the 3.9-year weighted average lease term is precisely the feature that makes the income arguable at the next trade: renewals, not the building, will set the exit.

Turner's own framing concedes as much. If the park could not be built today, the gap between what a 1985 rent roll collects and what the corridor's tenants will pay when their leases roll is where the $57 million gets made — or does not. Watch whether Link returns as the seller on the next acquisition.