CapRock Partners has acquired 32.5 acres in the east Dallas suburb of Sunnyvale, Texas, with plans to develop an industrial park with three warehouse buildings totaling 518,000 square feet. The campus, called Clay Road Business Park, will be the southern California-based CapRock’s first ground-up construction project in Texas.
The company plans to break ground on the business park next year, with completion scheduled for 2026. Clay Road Business Park will include three shallow-bay buildings with varying depths and sizes, but all of them will feature 32-foot clear heights, dock-high and ramp loading doors, ESFR sprinklers and trailer parking.
The site, at 101 Clay Road, is about 15 miles east of downtown Dallas and 35 miles from Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. It is also situated in a major DFW industrial submarket.
Major distribution tenants in the area include FedEx Freight, Lineage Cold Storage, Daltile, Pep Boys, and General Dynamic. Such institutional investors and owners as Blackstone, Clarion, Exeter, Goldman Sachs and Prologis have also been active in the area.
The developer acquired the property in an off-market deal for an unspecified price. JLL represented CapRock in the transaction, led by industrial brokers Kurt Griffin, Nathan Orbin, Dalton Knipe and Weston King.
Clay Road will be the company’s first development in Texas, but hardly its only real estate play in the state. In April, CapRock acquired Peachtree Distribution Center, a 396,750-square-foot, fully leased facility in Mesquite, a Dallas-Fort Worth submarket, its first industrial property in the state.
Thus far CapRock has about 2 million square feet of industrial in the state, either acquired, under contract or in the development process. CapRock has been an active industrial investor and developer in the western and central U.S., with a total investment and development pipeline of more than 32 million square feet since 2009.
DFW industrial fundamentals still strong
The Dallas-Fort Worth industrial market has strong fundamentals, with 9 million square feet of positive absorption in the second quarter of 2024, according to Newmark. That is roughly in line with quarterly absorption levels in 2023.
Year-over-year, rents for DFW industrial gained 9.4 percent in the second quarter of this year, coming in at $9.85 per square foot, which Newmark terms a new historical high.
Developers have responded by upping the supply dramatically, though at a somewhat slower pace in the second quarter of 2024. Still, 20.7 million square feet were under construction during the quarter, and vacancy has increased by 280 basis points compared with last year, coming in at 9.6 percent.
This story originally appeared on Commercial Property Executive.
