W.W. Grainger has paid $78 million for a vacant warehouse alongside a massive distribution center that the industrial supplies seller has occupied for more than a decade.
Grainger earlier this month bought the 849,691-square-foot warehouse at 501 Internationale Parkway in Minooka from industrial landlord Prologis, according to Grundy County property records.
That building is immediately west of a just over 1 million-square-foot distribution center that Lake Forest-based Grainger owns at 701 Ferguson Blvd., also known as 701 Grainger Way.
The 501 Internationale building previously was leased to third-party logistics firm Kenco, but a Prologis spokesperson said it was vacant at the time of the sale, with Grainger planning to occupy the building.
“We assess all opportunities in the markets where we operate, and this sale aligns with our strategic approach to managing our logistics real estate portfolio in the Chicago market,” Sean Olvany, vice president and Chicago market officer at Prologis, said in a statement to CoStar News.
Publicly traded Grainger did not respond Friday to a request for comment from CoStar News.
The expanding Grainger distribution campus is about 50 miles southwest of Chicago’s Loop business district along Interstate 80.
The deal comes as industrial transactional volume is on an upswing in the Chicago area. Though sales volume has slowed significantly from a boom after the arrival of COVID-19, Chicago’s industrial sales velocity has expanded by almost 18% over the past year, while the U.S. market rose only by 0.3% during this time, according to CoStar data.
Logistics-related space has accounted for $2.4 billion of the $3.9 billion in sales during that time.
Grainger’s deal is in line with a trend in recent years in which occupiers of space have increased their ownership in the Chicago area, according to Rhea Stephen, Chicago’s senior director of analytics at CoStar.
Grainger’s deal in Minooka is one of the largest single-property industrial sales in the area over the past year.
In another recent deal in Minooka, Atlanta-based MDH Partners paid almost $137 million for three warehouses. The seller in that deal was LXP Industrial Trust, which acquired those buildings from Prologis for a slightly higher combined price in deals completed 2019 and 2020, CoStar News reported last month.
For the record
The buyer was represented by JLL broker Rob Wheeler. The seller was represented by Lee & Associates broker Jeff Galante.