When Ferdinand Seefried started a commercial property company financed by European investors in 1983, he decided to focus on developing warehouses in growing American cities. The move chagrined of some of Seefried's backers in Germany and Austria who would have preferred to have ownership in new malls or gleaming office towers.

"They were surprised because when I started building warehouses in 1983-84, industrial real estate was not a real estate asset class particularly favored by Europeans," Seefried said in an interview.

Thirty-seven years later, it's clear he made the right choice when he picked nondescript warehouses over sexier properties. His company, Seefried Properties, grew significantly as it followed clients to major transportation hubs in Dallas, Chicago and Washington, D.C. The business really took off after the Great Recession, when Seefried began developing build-to-suit logistics facilities for the nation's largest retailers, including Home Depot and Amazon.

Seefried is one of the biggest developers of Amazon sorting, non-sorting and last-mile distribution facilities and has built more than 45 facilities for Amazon in states across the country. The developer's work for Amazon led to new jobs for other major retailers, including PetSmart and Best Buy.

"Everyone realized that we are a big developer for Amazon and have been for 10 years," Seefried said. "So they are figuring out, 'These guys must know what they’re doing, otherwise they wouldn’t get more and more business from Amazon.' "

Seefried Properties has grown to a company with offices in Phoenix, Chicago, Dallas and Southern California, in addition to its headquarters near Truist Park just outside of Atlanta. Seefried is the firm's executive chairman and works with Seefried Properties President and CEO Rob Rakusin, Chief Operating Officer Greg Herren, Chief Development Officer Jim Condon, Senior Vice President Jason Quintel and Senior Vice President Doug Smith.

After moving to the United States from his native Austria in 1977, firm founder Seefried experienced initial success by developing warehouses and distribution centers for freight-forwarding companies just as non-stop cargo travel took off between Europe and East Asia at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

"As a consequence, freight forwarders settled here, opened offices and needed warehouse space," Seefried said. "That was the beginning of our company. I did this for 10 years with great success, first in Atlanta. Then I moved to other cities, always with the same freight forwarders as a tenant, to Orlando, Dallas, Chicago, Washington, D.C."

Seefried Properties' long-standing relationship with Amazon started after USAA Real Estate introduced the online retailer to the property firm. USAA "used to finance and still finances today a significant amount of the transactions we do with Amazon, both debt and equity," Seefried said.

Seefried first developed a distribution center for Amazon in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The firm completed the 1 million-square-foot building at Discovery Drive in October 2011.

"When we started building the first Amazon [centers], they had one floor, basically the ground floor," he said. "And then they introduced a mezzanine structure and then there was a certain evolution going higher and higher. And now the so-called sort facilities have four and a half floors with 95-foot-tall ceilings."

Seefried said it has been fascinating to watch as e-commerce related companies began building multi-level warehouses around 2015. "Before that, no one built multistory buildings," he said. "Multistory buildings obviously are a good solution for e-commerce related retailers and some of these floors are, to a large extent, fenced off for people and only robots handle the picking of the merchandise."

E-commerce retailers prefer built-to-suit and warehouses with multiple stories because they can be designed so critical material handling equipment fit precisely inside their spaces, Seefried said.

"The material handling equipment is very expensive; everything has to be perfect," he added. "The column spacing and ceiling heights and the width of the building and everything should fit exactly to their material handling equipment, and that’s why they prefer a new building to an existing building."

Seefried Properties continues to develop new logistics facilities for Amazon. Seefried is wrapping up a new 700,000-square-foot fulfillment center that straddles two counties in the Atlanta suburb of Stone Mountain, Georgia, and started construction in January on a building that will contain 2.31 million square feet of fulfillment capacity in Memphis, Tennessee.

His firm, Seefried said, also is developing speculative industrial projects in several states. All told, the company has a mix of 25 build-to-suit and speculative industrial projects currently under construction and another two dozen in various planning stages.

Looking back to the early 1980s, Seefried said the decision to focus solely on industrial development was the right one.

"We certainly chose the right markets in the 2000s, and specializing in the e-commerce market after 2010 was certainly also the right strategic decision," Seefried said.

twilbert@costar.com
@twilbert

Mohr Partners, a wholly-owned advisory firm focused on representing corporate occupiers, has tapped James Leahy as managing partner.

Leahy returns to Mohr Partners to help lead the firm's growing business representing major corporations across Northern California and the San Francisco Bay area. He will work with long-time partner Robin Leamy, who also recently rejoined Mohr Partners as managing principal, and with Matt Wersel, managing partner.

Co-owner of the Marston Family Vineyard in the Napa Valley, Leahy previously served as principal at Leamy Realty Group after leaving Mohr Partners' corporate accounts and business development division.

Valerie Bowman has joined Lee & Associates as executive vice president in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania.

Bowman most recently served as senior vice president of Global Corporate Solutions at JLL and, prior to that, was a member of CBRE’s global corporate services group.

With more than 20 years of industry experience, Bowman was involved in the management of Verizon’s 100,000-square-foot portfolio, a pharmaceutical headquarters transaction in Tokyo and a $300 million office portfolio disposition.

Coldwell Banker Commercial Aspire Realty Services has hired Andrew Sylvester as an associate in Columbus, Ohio.

Sylvester is launching his career in commercial real estate, learning the brokerage industry in central Ohio from Anthony Maronitis and Chris Howard, principals at Aspire, as the company continues its strategic growth in the region.

After graduating from Ohio University in 2016, Sylvester worked as a project manager for a third-party logistics company in Pittsburgh and for a residential developer in Columbus. He has served as a member of the Army National Guard since 2013.