One of the world's largest real estate investment trusts focusing on temperature-controlled logistics facilities is making a leadership change at the top as it works to end a cold spell and balance occupancy levels at its properties.
Americold Realty Trust announced Monday that its president, Robert Chambers, will become its next CEO and a member of its board of directors, effective Sept. 1. The Atlanta-area REIT said Chambers will replace CEO George Chappelle, who is set to retire.
The move comes as the cold storage REIT says demand for the niche property type is failing to heat up. The drop in activity has coincided with a large fall in the company's stock price. It closed at $14.80 a share on Tuesday, compared to $29.53 a share roughly one year ago.
“Looking to the second half of the year, we expect the challenging demand environment to continue, with occupancy and throughput levels remaining below typical seasonality trends," Chappelle said in a statement in Americold's second-quarter earnings report released this month.
Elevated interest rates, tariffs, inflation, government benefit reductions and excess capacity combined to crimp demand and negatively affect occupancy rates in the temperature-controlled logistics space industry, the outgoing CEO said. Despite those headwinds, cold storage will remain a mission-critical asset over the long term, Chappelle said.
Cold storage executives said at last year's I.CON Cold Storage conference in Las Vegas that they were optimistic that 2025 would be a year of recovery for the industry. But that has yet to materialize.
Americold owns and/or operates 237 temperature-controlled warehouses totaling about 1.5 billion refrigerated cubic feet of storage, its second-quarter report noted. It is the second-largest cold-storage REIT based on cubic feet of storage. Lineage, a company that went public last year, is the largest with 3 billion cubic feet of temperature-controlled space in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.
Incoming CEO Chambers has held various roles throughout his 12-year career with Americold, including president of the Americas, executive vice president and chief commercial officer, and vice president of commercial finance. He also served as chief financial officer of transportation and logistics company Saia Inc., held leadership roles at CEVA Logistics, and worked for KPMG.
Americold said it is set to participate in several investment conferences over the coming months, providing investors with an opportunity to meet with members of the executive leadership team including Chambers.