What Company Just Bought a Massive Footprint in Cedar Rapids & Iowa City?
One company has purchased five gigantic industrial buildings in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City in one of the biggest deals of its type in the state of Iowa. The question is, 'Who bought them all?' There are a few distinct possibilities.
REjournals reports that JLL, a real estate services company, sold three Iowa City buildings that are a combined 992,250 square feet (nearly 49 acres) to an unnamed buyer. JLL says the same buyer also purchased two buildings in Cedar Rapids. Combined, the Cedar Rapids buildings are 410,000 square feet (more than 21 acres).
The three large Iowa City buildings are in the photo above. They're located at 2561, 2570, and 2610 Independence Road, on the southeast side of Iowa City.
The two large Cedar Rapids buildings (in the photo below) are at 5404 and 5507 Ely Road just east of C St. S.W., south of Highway 30.
Combined, the five buildings encompass just over 1.4 million-square-foot. The selling price? $54 million. Rejournals says all of the buildings were built in the early part of the 2000s. JLL told REjournals 80 percent of the space that had been leased, and was officially purchased this week, is already occupied. They expect 100 percent occupancy by the end of this year.
So who's the buyer? It's likely not FedEx. Last week, plans were revealed for a huge new FedEx warehouse in Cedar Rapids.
Late last fall, Millionacres reported that five companies in the United States accounted for nearly 600 million square feet of warehouse space, five times more than in 2010. The companies are Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Alphabet (formerly Google).
Take your pick as to which of those companies you think it might be but know this... CNBC said last summer that because of the incredible boom in online sales, companies may require an additional one BILLION square feet of warehouses by the middle of this decade. If you built all of that in Cedar Rapids, it would cover half the city.
Just two months ago, the Des Moines Register announced developers in Iowa's capital city were planning to build a million square feet of warehouse space. If you've got some money and some land, build big. The buyers are out there.
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