Industrial Pricing Convinces Generation Owners to Sell

There has been an increase in industrial generational transactions in Los Angeles. These are properties that have been owned for several decades and passed down through families, and rarely trade hands. Owners of the properties—mostly private family offices—are deciding to sell in response to record pricing levels that are at or nearing peak levels.

“There are transactions that are going down right now in this phase of the cycle that we haven’t seen in 20 years,” Jeff Stephens, SVP at CBRE, tells GlobeSt.com. “You might see a one-off transaction like that where someone that has held a property for a long time decides to dispose of it and move on. This time, we are seeing a lot of them. I think that is related to the fact that more people are deciding to take their chips off the table as values have gone up so dramatically in the last five years. Land values have gone from $30 per square foot to $70 to $80 per square foot. Most of the properties are older, land-value transactions.”

Many of these deals are smaller properties and dated, but well located in supply-constrained submarkets. Stephens recently sold a property in Pico Rivera, for example, that the family had held for 100 years. Most investors thought the family would never sell, but current market conditions encouraged them to cash out. “Some of these are smaller deals of 10,000 to 40,000 square feet,” says Stephens. “These are deals where family entities have passed the property from generation to generation over the years.”

It is unusual for so many generational deals to come to the market at once, and it is likely that we won’t see many of these deals again in our lifetime. “These are transactions that haven’t occurred in 40 or 50 years and that we probably won’t see again for another 50 years,” says Stephens. “It is going to take a lot for these properties to once again double in value so that owners will bring them to market. It is hard to predict what land values are going to do, but I don’t know that they are going to double again in the next five years.”

In the meantime, institutional players are taking advantage. Institutions have won most of these generational deals. “Everyone is getting more aggressive, and they are looking to deploy capital in the infill markets,” says Stephens. “There is no sign of demand going down in the near term. We have seen mostly institutional players and the most active developers in the market picking up most of the deals. Every sale has at least five to 10 groups competing for it.”