ElmTree Pays $105M for Five Properties

ST. LOUIS—ElmTree Net Lease Fund II, a St. Louis-based firm, has just acquired five single-tenant net lease investment properties for a total of $105.2 million. The industrial and office buildings are located across the US and currently occupied under, or have commitments for, 10- to 15-year lease agreements.

Three of the properties are build-to-suits, including a 306,406-square-foot, industrial facility in Lafayette, IN. Upon completion, General Electric Co. will lease the property, which sits on 53.47 acres, and use it to house its subsidiary GE Aviation. This will be its seventh aviation facility established in the US over the past seven years. It will operate a highly-advanced assembly line, GE officials say.

The second build-to-suit is a 175,000-square-foot warehouse and office building located on the 12-acre Tyco Electronics campus in Shakopee, a suburb of Minneapolis that, as reported in GlobeSt.com, has attracted a significant amount of interest from net lease investors. The project will have about 20,000-square-feet of warehouse space, 35,000-square-feet of lab space and 120,000-square-feet of office space. ADC Telecommunications, Inc., a communications company that was acquired by Tyco Electronics in 2010, will lease the building. Tyco recently sold its existing building, so the roughly 350 employees from that location will soon move into the new facility.

A 70,000-square-foot, three-story office facility located in Roanoke, VA, is the third build-to-suit property new to ElmTree's portfolio. Upon completion, Allstate Insurance Co. will use it for IT, claims and subrogation. It will also provide space for two call centers and replace an outdated facility in Roanoke that Allstate has used for decades.

ElmTree also acquired two existing facilities. One is a 57,260-square-foot office and call center in Fort Myers, FL. Comcast of the South Inc., a fully-owned subsidiary of Comcast Corp., occupies the building, which sits on 7.9 acres. The company plans to hire an additional 220 employees for this facility, which serves as Comcast's Center of Excellence and call center.

The final acquisition is a 59,568-square-foot, two-story office building located in New Providence, NJ. Reed Elsevier, Inc., a holding company that operates as a publisher and information company, leases this facility, which sits on 7.39 acres of land. The property, which houses 170 employees, has been owned and occupied by Reed Elsevier or one of its subsidiaries since 1978. It sits near New Jersey Transit's Murray Hill Station, which provides direct commuter rail service into New York and allows the company to recruit the younger workers living in New York City.