Asian real estate titan buying North Las Vegas buildings for $125M

In another sign of growing appetite for Southern Nevada warehouses, an Asian real estate giant bought two industrial buildings for nearly $125 million.

Global Logistic Properties acquired an 813,120-square-foot building occupied by online retailer Amazon and a 570,810-square-foot building occupied by baby products maker The Honest Co., property records show.

The sale, by developer VanTrust Real Estate, closed Dec. 26.

Amazon’s building, 4550 Nexus Way, traded for $73.4 million, and The Honest Co.’s building, 5550 Donovan Way, sold for about $51.4 million.

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Both are in the Northgate Distribution Center at Lamb Boulevard and Interstate 15 in North Las Vegas.

Efforts to speak with a GLP representative before Wednesday’s publication deadline were unsuccessful.

The sale comes amid an industrial-property development boom in Southern Nevada that’s been fueled largely by speculators. Investors are planning or constructing projects without tenants lined up first but don’t seem to be struggling to fill buildings, signing e-commerce distributors and other tenants.

Southern Nevada’s industrial vacancy rate was 4.9 percent in the third quarter, according to brokerage

Colliers International. The firm’s Las Vegas research manager, John Stater, figures vacancy is at its lowest point in 10 years.

“We’re in a good place overall,” he said.

Kansas City, Missouri-based VanTrust has said that Northgate is the largest speculative industrial development project in Southern Nevada history. It also has told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that it’s planning a 1.2 million- to 1.3 million-square-foot speculative project, called Tropical Distribution Center, a few miles west of Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

Keith Earnest, executive vice president of development, said in November that VanTrust had completed 2.2 million square feet at Northgate, with just 87,000 square feet of that available for lease. The full build-out calls for 3.2 million square feet.

Efforts to speak with Earnest or another VanTrust representative were unsuccessful this week.

GLP is Asia’s biggest warehouse operator, Reuters has reported, with holdings in China and Japan as well as Europe, Brazil and the United States.

Its global portfolio spanned 603 million square feet as of November.

A Chinese consortium reached a deal in July to buy the Singapore government-backed company for $11.6 billion, reports said.

Wade Pope, senior project executive with Northgate’s general contractor, Martin-Harris Construction, did not discuss the recent property sale but confirmed that Amazon and The Honest Co. are the two buildings’ only tenants.

Seattle-based Amazon, led by billionaire founder Jeff Bezos, did not respond to requests for comment.

A representative for Los Angeles-based Honest said that the company, launched by actress Jessica Alba, “has no comment for this story.”

Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342. Follow @eli_segall on Twitter.