Trinity Capital and Mortenson buy 15-acre Richmond industrial site

Trinity Capital Advisors and Mortenson Properties have acquired a 15-acre industrial development site in Northlake Business Park in Hanover County, Virginia, taking the joint venture into the Richmond market for the first time, according to Connect CRE, without disclosing what it paid for the land, the input that decides whether a 2028 delivery pencils. The partners plan two rear-load buildings totaling 231,120 square feet on the site, designed for a broad range of prospective users in what the report calls one of Richmond's most established and supply-constrained submarkets.

Construction is expected to begin in summer 2027 and delivery in the third quarter of 2028, a schedule that leaves about fifteen months of building between groundbreaking and completion. Mortenson will serve as general contractor on buildings it co-owns; Townes Site Engineering is providing civil engineering, and Range Commercial has been retained to lead leasing. A builder holding equity in what it constructs is ordinary in industrial work, but it also keeps construction risk and leasing risk inside the same joint venture, and this one is carrying both into a market it is entering for the first time.

The submarket does most of the arguing: Northlake spans roughly 6.8 million square feet and is 99% leased, its tenant roster running from Amazon and Ferguson to Owens & Minor, Pitney Bowes, Chadwell Supply and Anixter, the kind of occupancy that leaves a tenant needing space now with few places to go. That is the condition under which a developer pays for the last available pad rather than looking elsewhere in the metro.

For Trinity Capital, the project extends an industrial platform the firm is building across the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic, according to the report, into a market where it had no footprint. It lands on the favored side of a split PWD has been tracking: industrial capital is repricing in two directions, with infill and supply-constrained product clearing at scarcity levels while older flex and commodity buildings trade against vacancy. Northlake's 99% occupancy is the scarcity case in miniature.

With delivery targeted for the third quarter of 2028 and no preleasing disclosed, Range Commercial's signings between now and then will be the first real read on whether a park that is effectively full translates into rent for 231,120 square feet that does not yet exist.