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Market Insights · Capital Markets
Investors are finding our business parks
4 Business Parks · 934K SF · 2 Min Read
Four recent business-park sales drew buyers from New York, Greensboro and Germany. Demand for this product is no longer regional.
Our last four business-park dispositions totaled roughly 934,000 square feet across North Carolina and Alabama. The buyers could hardly have been more different: a Carolinas operator, New York institutional capital, and a German investor buying through Atlanta.
Institutional capital, outside the gateway markets
Two of the four went to New York institutional buyers: Creedmoor Business Park, 285,000 square feet in Creedmoor, and Mumford Business Park, 118,000 square feet in Greenville. Neither sits in a major gateway market.
Creedmoor shows what that buyer was underwriting. The park traded 100% leased on triple-net terms to six tenants, anchored by AISIN, a Toyota subsidiary and Global Fortune 500 company, and General Electric. Leases carried escalations of 3% or more, expirations were staggered through 2033, and in-place rents sat below market, in a submarket with sub-5% vacancy and no new construction within five miles. Durable credit, embedded rent growth and scarce competing supply are exactly what institutional capital is built to find.
The local buyer still wins
The 260,000-square-foot park at 5398 MLK Boulevard in Greenville sold to an operator based in Greensboro. A wider field of bidders did not shut the local buyer out. Regional operators bring first-hand knowledge of the tenants and the submarket, and a readiness to handle leasing, renewals and day-to-day management themselves. That still carries weight when the bids come in.
Capital from overseas
Damsky Business Park, 221,000 square feet in Birmingham, Alabama, went to a German investor buying through Atlanta: European capital acquiring a Southeast business park. It is a reminder that the buyer pool for this product now reaches beyond the region, and beyond the country.
The likely buyer for a well-leased business park may not be down the road.
What it means for owners
Taken together, the four sales make a simple point. The likely buyer for a well-leased business park may not be down the road. It could be an institution in New York or an investor in Germany.
Those buyers price risk differently, and each needs the rent roll, tenant credit and submarket laid out clearly before committing capital. A sale marketed only to the usual local names risks leaving them out of the room. Putting institutional, local and international capital in front of the same asset is what creates competitive tension.
Source: Bryant Capital Advisors transaction records.
