EDGERTON, MO-The DeLong Co. Inc. has purchased almost 9 acres at Logistics Park Kansas City, located adjacent to the BNSF Railway’s $250 million Kansas City Intermodal Facility now under construction. DeLong is the first company to locate in the new park.

Richard Allen, CEO of park owner the Allen Group, did not divulge the amount the land sold for or the size of DeLong’s planned facility. The exporting company plans to ship more than 100 containers a day through the intermodal from its facility.

His 560-acre park is made up of two connecting triangles of land, with the 443-acre intermodal property in the middle. Plans call for about 10 million square feet of users for the park, Allen tells GlobeSt.com.

He says demand is high, and he says he anticipates a few more land user announcements by December. “We are doing a tremendous amount of activity in terms of build-to-suits and potential transactions,” Allen says.

The park is one of the few to offer direct rail access, and container traffic has shifted into much higher gears in the past few months, he says. “We have about 9% vacancy in the Kansas City, MO industrial market, but for class A industrial, the vacancy level is more like 1%.”

The DeLong facility, and the intermodal itself, won’t be finished until fourth quarter 2013. Construction started on the intermodal only three months ago. The railroad firm wasn’t even sure they could go ahead with the project until it received a $35 million grant from the state’s Rail Assistance Program late last year. The grant will be repaid from state utilities tax generated by the project and the logistics park.

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