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Hunt Southwest Real Estate Development breaks ground on 1M-SF spec industrial building in Cedar Port

September 8, 2020

Dallas-based Hunt Southwest Real Estate Development has broken ground on a 1-million-square-foot speculative industrial project in Baytown. The company said the project was driven, in part, by the surge in online retail sales amid the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.

The building, dubbed the Cedar Port Trade Center, is located within the massive TGS Cedar Port Industrial Park near the intersection of FM 1405 and Borusan Road. The industrial park is home to distribution centers for Amazon, Home Depot, Ikea and Walmart, among other tenants.

Hunt Southwest Real Estate Development’s new facility will feature 40-foot clear height, LED warehouse lighting, ESFR sprinkler system and expansive parking for cars and trailers, according to a news release. The facility will also feature 25 acres of additional adjacent land, which will allow for future expansion of the building to 1.3 million square feet or for the addition of vehicle/trailer parking or outside storage, the company said.

“Covid-19 has accelerated the shift from bricks-and-mortar retail sales to e-commerce and fulfillment, and it’s the large users that are actively signing leases in this environment,” Hunt Southwest President Preston Herold said in the release. “Yet the capital markets and spec development community have not adapted quickly enough to meet the requirements of these larger e-commerce/fulfillment users. As a result, these larger users have had to resort to the time-consuming, build-to-suit route. We are deploying our entrepreneurial capital to take advantage of this market inefficiency and provide immediately occupiable, state-of-the-art space to these large users.”

Hunt Southwest Real Estate Development has tapped Houston-based Powers Brown Architecture to design the project and Houston’s E.E. Reed Construction to serve as general contractor. CBRE’s Jason Dillee and Nathan Wynne are the leasing agents for Cedar Port Trade Center.

The building is scheduled to be delivered in March 2021.

Cedar Port Industrial Park has been called the largest rail- and barge-served industrial park in the United States. The industrial park spans 15,000 acres, with more than 10,000 acres available for development.

The industrial park has continued to grow rapidly since Trans-Global Solutions Inc. formed a partnership that purchased Cedar Port Industrial Park in December 2014.

Houston-based real estate developer Welcome Group LLC purchased 23 acres in the park for future development earlier this summer. Also this year, High Street Logistics Properties paid an undisclosed amount to acquire the Cedar Crossing Distribution Center, a 129,527-square-foot property in the park, from Denver-based Mountain West Industrial Properties and Galveston-based American National Insurance Co.

In November, The Woodlands-based NIT Industrial paid an undisclosed sum to acquire a 151,260-square-foot distribution center in the industrial park from Boston-based Stag Industrial (NYSE: STAG). Also last year, an entity affiliated with NIT Industrial acquired 12.8 acres within the Cedar Port Industrial Park. At the time, the company said it planned to build a four-building spec project with 204,000 square feet of leasable space.

By Jeff Jeffrey, Houston Business Journal
https://www.bizjournals.com/houston/news/2020/09/08/hunt-southwest-real-estate-development-cedar-port.html