Workers collect orders at an Amazon fulfillment centre in Rugeley, a town in Staffordshire in central England.Phil Noble/Reuters
Bentall Kennedy is snapping up a 1.1-million-square-foot Amazon.com distribution centre in Texas.
It is buying the facility, which sits on 68 acres in Haslet, near Fort Worth, on behalf of one of its institutional investors.
"We think there's a real opportunity in distribution warehouse and fulfillment centres," Bentall Kennedy CEO Gary Whitelaw said in an interview. "We think there will be a whole series of opportunities, certainly not all a million square feet, but at different sizes and different levels of proximity to the consumer."
Bentall, which got its start as a small Canadian construction firm roughly a century ago, advises pension funds, insurers and other institutional investors on their real estate holdings and is partly owned by the California Public Employee Retirement System and British Columbia Investment Management Corp. It declined to disclose the price it is paying for the distribution centre. The seller is Hillwood Development Company.
Amazon signed a 15-year lease with Hillwood in January, at which point the building was still under construction. The online behemoth is now using the site as a regional fulfillment centre for items such as books and games (Amazon has other locations nearby that deal with bigger items). It shipped its first item from this location, a night-vision hunter's camera, on Oct.16.
Bentall Kennedy says that the property's attractive features include easy highway access and high ceiling clearance height, things that are appealing to e-commerce retailers. It also has a large number of parking spots to accommodate the hundreds of workers who are needed in the distribution centre.
"It's really quite amazing, the degree of robotics for picking and packing and weighing," Mr. Whitelaw said.
"Amazon's tenancy alone makes this property a highly desirable investment, and the building will retain a high value when the lease expires in 15 years," David Nielsen, senior vice-president at Bentall Kennedy, said in a statement. "We see strong long-term value in large distribution centres built for e-commerce fulfillment."