Two LLCs with a Los Angeles address listed for real estate attorney Phyllis Alden Truby purchased the industrial property located at 696 East Trimble Road in San Jose. The names of the two companies, FW01 and WF01, which equally own the asset, do not give any hints to the owners behind these names, however, the tax statement is requested to be mailed to S.M. Swartz of Lafayette, CA. The 206,642 square foot building sold on June 29, 2017 for $62 million, according to public records, which comes to $300 per square foot.
The seller was Bethesda, MD-based NewTower Trust Company, which owned the asset through ti Multi-Employer Property Trust, an open-ended commingled real estate equity fund that invest in a diversified core portfolio of institutional-quality real estate assets in the United States. According to its web site, MEPT is one of the largest open end real estate equity funds in the U.S.
The building is presently home to FedEx, which had signed a ten year lease at the property in 2015, according to Compstack.
The industrial market across the region has been remarkably strong since end of the Great Recession. Buoyed by the growing e-commerce industry and transforming retail habits of a growing region, the industrial real estate sector is seeing historic lows in vacancy. According to a recent, first quarter of 2017 San Francisco Bay Area Industrial Overview, the region saw net absorption of 1.2 million square feet. The Silicon Valley submarket brought in 368,000 square feet of that figure. At the same time, the average lease rate increased to $1.45 per square foot, but in Silicon Valley, that figure is hovering around $1.78, according to the report. And while roughly 1 million square feet of space is under construction in Silicon Valley, the vacancy rate is above regional average at 5.3 percent. The region is sitting at around 3.4 percent vacancy.
