ST. LOUIS—Saddle Creek Corp. has just signed a lease to completely occupy the new 673 building at Gateway Commerce Center in the Metro East submarket, according to DTZ officials. It's a remarkable coup for TriStar Properties and PCCP, LLC, the joint venture partners that will deliver the 673,137 square-foot speculative distribution building later this month. The metro region had not seen a speculative project for the industrial sector since 2007, but as reported in GlobeSt.com, in 2014 tenants absorbed a historic level of space and sent the vacancy rate plummeting to a 10-year low. And the quick lease-up at Gateway should attract even more attention to St. Louis in 2015.
“TriStar and PCCP had the willingness and foresight to have a building up and ready to go,” DTZ managing director Ed Lampitt tells GlobeSt.com, “and that got Saddle Creek here.” He represented the owners in the transaction. DTZ also provides property management services for the building.
What makes this deal perhaps most impressive is that Saddle Creek, a Lakeland, FL-based 3PL firm, will use the building for a customer that until now did not have a distribution operation in the St. Louis area. “It's truly new to the market,” Lampitt says. “We are currently served by their distribution operations in Chicago, but now they are expanding and adding a St. Louis operation. So we are not just moving a local company from one building to another.”
He is not authorized to disclose the name of the customer. But Terry Stieve, managing director of JLL in St. Louis, tells GlobeSt.com that Saddle Creek will use the facility to distribute products for Lowe's Home Improvement.
Lampitt hopes that the customer's expansion to the region will cause others to give St. Louis a look. “There are a lot of big box users that don't have operations here because they serve us out of Chicago.”
But the new lease, and the many inquiries about the property beforehand, has already helped kickoff more development. Later this year, Gateway will deliver its next development, a 36' clear, 700,000 square foot cross-docked building.
Saddle Creek's new building has 32' clear heights. But Lampitt says “we're seeing a trend in the Midwest of users looking for 36'. If you want to stay ahead of the curve, 36' is the way to go.”
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Brian J. Rogal
Brian J. Rogal is a Chicago-based freelance writer with years of experience as an investigative reporter and editor, most notably at The Chicago Reporter, where he concentrated on housing issues. He also has written extensively on alternative energy and the payments card industry for national trade publications.
