MDH buys Laredo warehouse as border-trade bet

MDH Partners has acquired a 129,301-square-foot industrial building at 302 Grand Central Boulevard in Laredo, Texas, fully leased to DHL Global Forwarding, with no purchase price disclosed in the Connect CRE report; Northmarq's Craig Tomlinson represented the seller and MDH's Makenna Barbara sourced the deal.

The 2000-vintage asset sits in Milo Industrial Park, minutes from the World Trade Bridge that Connect CRE calls the busiest commercial land crossing in North America, and carries the hardware for border logistics: 44 dock-high doors, 47 trailer parking stalls, Union Pacific rail service and a fenced, secured yard. DHL has occupied the building continuously since 2001 and as its sole tenant since 2007, a tenure that turns the ordinary single-tenant concentration question into a durability story.

Laredo handles more than $25 billion in cross-border commerce each month and accounts for nearly 60 percent of annual U.S.-Mexico trade, according to Connect CRE, which identifies the city as North America's busiest inland port — a trade lane tied to the integration of two manufacturing economies, not to the leasing cycle. A buyer underwriting this asset is underwriting the corridor itself.

The rail link connects the building to a network that PWD has watched extend to Mark IV's Victory Logistics District in Nevada, where a new Union Pacific spur brought direct rail access and put 100 acres of rail-ready land on the market; in Laredo, the rail is already in place and feeds a border crossing that cannot be replicated elsewhere.

The acquisition is a trade-flow purchase: DHL's 25-year run makes the near-term income predictable while Laredo's monthly trade figure makes the corridor's long-term role hard to dispute, leaving MDH paying for a position on the corridor rather than for a 2000-vintage shell.