County Auctions Rare Industrial Parcel

SAN BERNARDINO, CA-The County of San Bernardino plans to sell nearly 99 acres of one of the last undeveloped parcels of industrially zoned land in Ontario at a live auction March 30. The property, which is three miles southeast of the Ontario International Airport, is expected to draw considerable investor and developer interest because Ontario has been the destination of choice for the huge warehouses and other industrial projects that have sprouted up in the Inland Empire for the past dozen years.The county has set a minimum bid of $45 million for the property, which consists of three contiguous raw land parcels and is being marketed under the name Ontario@Haven. The property is bounded by the 10, 15 and 60 freeways, with a rail spur running through it.The 99 acres represent one of the last large development sites in an area that once consisted of hundreds of acres of available land before corporations and industrial developers began moving to Ontario in the 1990s to set up huge warehouses and distribution centers. The Ontario-Mira Loma industrial market has grown into the largest industrial submarket in the Inland Empire, representing more than 114 million sf of the region's 317 million sf of industrial space.The growth in Ontario has also put the Inland Empire on the national map in terms of industrial space, boasting what distribution experts refer to as one of the largest concentrations of modern warehouse and distribution space in the US. The 317-million-sf Inland Empire industrial inventory is a little more than a third the size of the 918 million sf in Los Angeles County, much of the Inland Empire space is in newer and larger buildings that have been developed over the past dozen or so years.