A development team announced plans Wednesday for a warehouse complex roughly an hour southwest of downtown Atlanta aimed at the region’s growing manufacturing and logistics industries.
Grandview Partners and Farpoint Development recently acquired 134 acres in LaGrange to develop Lafayette Logistics Park, which is set to include up to 2 million square feet of warehouse space. The land was purchased from Southpoint Realty Group LLC at an undisclosed price.
Located along I-85, the complex will rise near Kia’s West Point manufacturing plant as well as factories and facilities by Walmart, Kimberly-Clark and Duracell. Grandview Partners, a minority-owned real estate fund manager based in Connecticut, said LaGrange’s status as a growing industrial hub will only increase with the future West Georgia Inland Port, a rail terminal set to connect to the state’s Port of Savannah.
“The LaGrange and surrounding industrial markets are poised for growth, and the state is investing the capital needed to support manufacturing,” Eric Freeman, a managing partner at Grandview Partners, said in a news release. “There is an ecosystem and infrastructure here that fosters growth and innovation, and the West Georgia Inland Port will only improve the connectivity to Atlanta and Savannah.”
Construction on Lafayette Logistics Park will begin early this year. The project’s first phase will consist of four industrial buildings that range from 187,000 to 270,000 square feet, and it’s expected to be completed by the end of 2024. A second phase will add an additional 1 million square feet of industrial facilities.
While high interest rates and macroeconomic headwinds have impacted Georgia’s office market and development ecosystem, the state’s industrial sector has remained strong.
A record number of new warehouses opened their doors in metro Atlanta between July and September, and more than 21 million square feet of new industrial space was under construction at the end of 2023, according to Cushman & Wakefield. Vacancy rates, which fell to 3% in late 2021 and early 2022, have increased to about 6% in recent financial quarters.
Though the vacancy rate has climbed, experts say that the Atlanta area market remains healthy.
LaGrange’s industrial market has almost no vacant space, according to data from CoStar. About 0.1% of available industrial inventory is empty, and the construction pipeline for the area only includes 500,000 square feet of speculative space, meaning they didn’t have any signed tenants before construction began. Grandview Partners said its logistics park aims to fill that void.
“It is critical to have a deep labor pool capable of meeting the demands of modern manufacturing, which this area has,” said Raj Menon, CEO of Grandview Partners. “Moreover, ground-up development makes sense as the manufacturing boom creates a need for modern facilities and efficient logistics sites.”
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