GlobeSt.com EXCLUSIVE: Home Depot's 235,000-SF Pact Seeds Site's Repositioning

GARLAND, TX-The six-month owner of the 1.1-million-sf Garland Business Park has landed Home Depot Inc.'s name on a 235,000-sf lease after it reworked a deal with its logistics provider. The Fortune 500 company is the first "name" tenant with any length on its term for the former Fleming Cos. complex.

Sources say the Atlanta-based Home Depot reviewed a handful of sites in the northeastern submarket, but then inked a two-year lease with several renewal options embedded with attractive rates for the warehouse space at 2600 McCree Rd. The space is on the market at $2.50 per sf net and 70 cents per sf on the finish-out side.

Eyeing the repositioning promise, an investment group from Downey, CA bought the Interstate 635-fronting park in April from Houston-based Grocers Supply. As previously reported on GlobeSt.com, Grocers Supply put the holding on the market in September 2003 not long after it took the deed from C&S Wholesale Grocers Inc. of Brattleboro, VT, one of the firms to pick off the bankrupt Fleming's US wholesale operations.

With the facility's new owners bent on repositioning the industrial foothold, locally based Shippers Warehouse Inc. took 400,000 sf for temporary storage in August, but just until year's end. A pallet company is leasing a 40,000-sf building at the rear of the site. Plus, Furniture in the Raw recently took 31,000 sf, but that deal too runs only for a few months.

Home Depot's broker Ryan Keiser with Trammell Crow Co. in Dallas isn't discussing the just-signed deal nor is CB Richard Ellis Inc.'s David Sours, who represents the building owner. But if sources are correct, Home Depot's local executives are planning to take down additional distribution space in the region--and its 235,000 sf comes with ample expansion room. The facility has slightly more than one million sf, 193 dock doors and 268,000 sf of freezer-cooler space, positioned on nearly 52.3 acres with plenty of trailer parking.