Two local firms with connections to private-equity giant Blackstone have paid more than $72 million for a FedEx distribution center just north of Chicago.
Centaur Capital Partners and Talos Capital bought the 314,028-square-foot warehouse at 5959 W. Howard St. in Niles, Illinois, according to online property records and an announcement from JLL, which brokered the deal.
The $72.2 million sale was completed last week, according to property records.
That is lower than the nearly $84.3 million that SEDCO Capital, a firm based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, paid for the property in April 2019, according to Cook County records and CoStar data.
The sale adds to an uptick in industrial property sales volume in the Chicago area. Investors have spent a combined $4 billion over the past 12 months, a 15% bump from a year earlier, according to CoStar data.
Because of its location one mile from Interstate 94 and eight miles from O’Hare International Airport, the property is a critical component of FedEx’s Midwest distribution network, according to JLL. FedEx has been a tenant since the warehouse was completed 2015, according to JLL, which said more than 11 acres of land on the site eventually could be developed.
“It is incredibly difficult to assemble a site in North Cook County large enough to accommodate a facility of this size with all of the additional car and trailer parking space required for an operation like this,” Kurt Sarbaugh, one of the JLL brokers who represented the seller, said in a statement. “Investors were drawn to the uniqueness of the site and the mission-critical nature of the operation.”
The buyers and seller of the property did not respond to requests for comment from CoStar News.
The firms taking over the property have longstanding ties to Blackstone.
Central Capital Partners is the family office of John Schreiber, who co-founded Blackstone Real Estate Advisors.
The former Blackstone executive most recently has invested about $180 million on two multifamily properties in Chicago, the 227-unit Parker Fulton Market tower and the 292-unit Cobbler Square Lofts complex.
Centaur’s partner on those apartment deals was Chicago-based JDL Development.
Talos Capital, led by Brian Townsend, in 2017 became the industrial investment arm for Blackstone before that firm later created Link Logistics Real Estate in 2019, according to the firm’s website.
In 2018, Townsend also began a partnership with Centaur, building a 5-million-square-foot portfolio in the Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and El Paso, Texas, markets, according to the site.
The seller of the FedEx property was a firm spun out from the Saudi Economic Development Company, which was founded in1976 as a trading and contracting company.
In 1996, it was transformed into a family office for the Bin Mahfouz family and the endowment for Sheikh Salem Bin Mahfouz, a pioneer in the country’s banking industry, according to the firm's website. In 2009, SEDCO Capital switched from a single-family office to an investor for multiple individuals, families and institutions, according to the site.
For the record
The seller was represented by JLL brokers Kurt Sarbaugh, Sean Devaney and John Huguenard.