Rexford Industrial Drops $94M On Arts District-Adjacent Complex

The Box Yard, a 260K SF industrial campus south of the Arts District and Downtown Los Angeles, has sold for $93.6M to Rexford Industrial Realty. 

The complex at 2425 East 12th St. sits just south of Olympic Boulevard and immediately west of the Los Angeles River. The property is marketed as a creative industrial complex and has tenants in tech, fashion, e-commerce and creative fields. 

Five new leases have been signed at the four-building complex, which has 11 tenant spaces, in the past six months. The Box Yard was 94% leased when it sold, according to Newmark, which brokered the deal on behalf of the seller, Bridge Industrial, and announced the sale.

“Investors continue to drive exceptional demand for highly functional industrial assets in gateway markets,” said Newmark Executive Managing Director Andrew Briner in a statement.

Bridge completed comprehensive renovations of the property in February 2020, spending approximately $4M over nine months to upgrade office and warehouse finishes, add LED lighting, paint the buildings’ exteriors and update landscaping to create a “new contemporary identity” for the property, according to Bridge. 

Bridge purchased the property in January 2019, paying $68M, according to commercial real estate data site Reonomy. At the time of the purchase, Brian Wilson, a partner for the West Region at Bridge, told the Los Angeles Business Journal that industrial users had been pushed out of the formerly industrial Arts District by the wave of residential, retail, office and hotel uses that were in the neighborhood’s pipeline and called The Box Yard “arguably the last pure industrial building located in such a proximity to the Arts District, and the vital business and residential districts of Downtown Los Angeles.” 

Central LA’s industrial market has experienced 76 consecutive quarters of sub-3% vacancy and has a current vacancy rate of 1.5%, according to Newmark Research. 

Rexford bought four other Los Angeles-area properties this month — two in the San Fernando Valley and two in the South Bay — spending a total of $188.9M, the REIT announced.

Newmark Executive Managing Directors Andrew Briner, Bret Hardy and Jim Linn, co-Head of U.S. Capital Markets Kevin Shannon, and Senior Managing Directors Scott Schumacher and Laura Stumm represented Bridge in the transaction.