C&W Completes Lease for 900,000-Square-Foot Distribution Center
Target Will Spend $50 Million to Convert Memphis Site for Regional E-Commerce
Suite 203, December 24, 2014 (Newswire.com) - Commercial real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield | Commercial Advisors, LLC has completed a 900,000-square-foot industrial lease with Target, which will spend $50 million to reposition 5461 Davidson Road in Memphis as a regional online fulfillment center. The property owner, an asset management and investment firm, was represented in the transaction by Patrick Walton and Kemp Conrad, SIOR with Cushman & Wakefield-Commercial Advisors, LLC in Memphis. Target was represented by Patrick Burke of CBRE.
“This project is a great Christmas present to the Memphis region and starts 2015 on a very positive note,” said Walton, noting that the distribution center is expected to generate more than 400 new jobs in Shelby County. “Labor played a major role for choosing Memphis.”
"Memphis is America's distribution center because it is so centrally located."
Kemp Conrad, Cushman & Wakefield
Hiring for the new distribution center is expected to begin in early 2015, and the site is slated to be operational by mid-2015. The facility will be managed for Target by Innotrac, a 3PL vendor, and will service the southeastern U.S.
Target’s site selection decision may also herald a growing trend in e-commerce distribution in the mid-south region. “It’s not necessarily a same-day requirement, but a more regionalized approach,” said Walton.
“In the past three years, users like Amazon and Walmart have invested in major tier-one markets and population centers to set up same-day or next-day delivery,” said Kemp Conrad, president of Cushman & Wakefield-Commercial Advisors Asset Services. “As those primary networks are built out, secondary regional investment will come next. Memphis is the perfect location to serve a large swath of the country for non time-sensitive catalog services.”
“Memphis is America’s distribution center because it is so centrally located,” added Conrad. “We can reach 75 percent of the country’s population within a three-day truck drive and we’re quadrimodal – meaning a nexus of logistical infrastructure including rail, roadways, runways and river.”
Located near Memphis International Airport and Lamar/Hwy. 78, 5461 Davidson Road features 30-foot clear ceiling heights. Formerly home to Hamilton Beach, the property had been recently utilized for seasonal requirements prior to Cushman & Wakefield-Commercial Advisors’ lease transaction with Target, which “represents the largest industrial transaction in this market this year, and in several years,” said Walton.
Cushman & Wakefield's industrial brokerage platform provides global resources and local expertise for tenant and landlord representation, disposition and acquisition services, transaction management, and industrial consulting including labor and demographic analysis. In the U.S. alone in 2013, this group completed nearly 6,700 industrial real estate transactions (excluding Capital Markets transactions) totaling 238.74 million square feet. The aggregate value of these transactions was greater than $7.34 billion.