North Palisade buys Santee drive-in site, starts 290,618-square-foot project

Colliers arranged the $22.75 million sale of 13.49 acres at 10990 N. Woodside Ave. in Santee, California, to North Palisade Partners, which started construction immediately on the Palisade Santee Commerce Center, a 290,618-square-foot multi-tenant project on the former Santee Drive-In site slated for completion in the third quarter of 2027.

The land basis is the number worth carrying away: roughly $1.69 million an acre across 13.49 acres and near $78 a square foot across the 290,618 square feet planned, though neither figure covers vertical construction and the coverage does not say whether any space has been preleased.

San Diego County industrial land rarely trades at this scale or with this kind of positioning, according to Evan McDonald, the Colliers executive vice president who represented North Palisade Partners and described the acquisition as a multi-year effort the buyer stayed with for the long-term opportunity. McDonald and Mark Lewkowitz, also an EVP at the brokerage, will serve as the project's exclusive leasing advisors, keeping the lease-up inside the same shop that ran the sale.

Colliers calls the property one of the only Class-A modern industrial warehouse opportunities in Central and East San Diego County, sitting inside Santee's established industrial corridor—the buyer-side brokerage's characterization, not an independent count of the submarket's inventory, but the sort of claim that will decide what rent the project can command at delivery.

This is the build-over-buy trade in its plainest form: a developer paying for dirt and putting a start behind it rather than bidding for existing product. A construction freeze that has thinned new supply across property types has turned development into the acquisition channel for managers that want industrial exposure at a cost basis they can defend, and Colliers has been collecting fees on both halves of that shift, closing a two-tenant Ohio industrial box in September and running a steady string of sale assignments through the fall.

Completion is slated for the third quarter of 2027, and the two brokers who arranged the land sale now hold the lease-up, so the same team's fee income depends on filling 290,618 square feet in a county where, by Colliers' own account, comparable Class-A space is thin; whether that scarcity still exists at delivery is the question the site's basis quietly bets on.