Retailer Walmart, after spending the past year buying a wide range of real estate from vacant land to malls and distribution facilities, has made one of its biggest industrial bets yet in Southern California.
A subsidiary of Walmart acquired a 507,000-square-foot cold-storage distribution facility in Riverside from State Street Global Advisors for $223 million, marking the largest cold-storage building sale in Southern California history, deals show.
The transaction comes as occupiers increasingly purchase facilities they view as mission-critical. It also reinforces the Inland Empire's role as one of the nation's most important food-distribution hubs, according to JLL Managing Director Scott Coyle, who helped represent Walmart in the deal.
“Demand for temperature-controlled logistics infrastructure continues to outpace supply across the greater Los Angeles basin,” Coyle said in a statement.
The Bentonville, Arkansas-based company has leased the property at 1001 Columbia Ave. since 2010 and will continue operating it as a temperature-controlled distribution center serving Southern California customers.
The facility sits near the intersection of three major Inland Empire freeways and serves one of the country's largest consumer markets. Replacing a refrigerated warehouse of similar scale today would likely require years of entitlement work, specialized construction and significantly higher development costs, according to property professionals.
“Many established businesses are swapping industrial space tenancy for ownership,” said Jesse Gundersheim, CoStar’s senior market analyst for Los Angeles. “Tax incentives for owners have increased, and there’s still the benefit of locking in real estate costs for the long term and securing critical assets.”
Cold storage demand
Walmart’s decision to buy rather than continue leasing the property mirrors some other moves the retailer has made elsewhere in the past year.
The company has acquired shopping centers in Connecticut and Pennsylvania where it already operated stores, part of a broader strategy to gain greater control over real estate tied to its long-term operations.
Also in the past year, Walmart has acquired roughly half a dozen industrial properties totaling well over $700 million, according to CoStar records. They range from Southern California and the Southwest to the Midwest, the Southeast and Canada, and include million‑square‑foot distribution centers and fulfillment hubs, specialized cold‑storage facilities and large development sites.
The Riverside facility serves the roughly 110 stores Walmart operates across the five-county Southern California region, including a Walmart Supercenter store about 8 miles away.
Walmart isn't the only firm choosing to purchase instead of lease in the industrial hotbed of the Inland Empire. Users have made up 24% of the industrial property buyers in the past year, up from the five-year average of 11%, according to CoStar research.
Cold-storage real estate occupies a unique niche within industrial property. These facilities require expensive refrigeration systems, specialized construction and substantial power capacity, making them significantly more difficult to develop than traditional warehouses.
The broader cold-storage sector has cooled after a construction boom completed millions of square feet of new inventory across the United States, according to CoStar research. Yet tenants continue gravitating toward newer, more efficient facilities while much of the nation’s cold-storage stock ages, creating a growing divide between modern buildings and older ones.
In mid‑2025, W.P. Carey paid about $140 million for the 302,850‑square‑foot cold‑storage complex at 15015 Valley View Ave. in Santa Fe Springs, then one of Southern California’s biggest single cold‑storage sales, buying the fully leased UNFI facility from a Brookfield‑backed fund.
That deal followed a 2022 benchmark in the same submarket, when Thor Equities and Danish pension fund PFA paid $85 million — roughly $535 a square foot — for a 158,800‑square‑foot Anheuser‑Busch facility.
Walmart's $223 million Riverside purchase now eclipses those prior marks.
For the record
In addition to Coyle and McWilliams, JLL's Tim O’Rourke represented Walmart in the acquisition. Jomar Benoit, Walmart senior manager of industrial real estate, also helped close the deal. Eastdil Secured represented the seller.