Listen to this articleA global investment firm has bought over half a million square feet spread across 16 distribution centers for $75 million, according to a broker who arranged the deal.
Taurus Investment Holdings has purchased Onward Investors’ portfolio of properties as its first foray into the Twin Cities metro industrial market, CBRE’s Senior Vice President Bentley Smith confirmed to Finance & Commerce on Wednesday.
In a press release, Taurus said that portfolio consists of 636,000 square feet of space that is 96% occupied. Taurus focuses on last-mile distribution centers, the release said, buying properties that are considered small-bay sites, or buildings that have a tenant-size of 10,000 square feet or less.
With a price tag of $75 million, the price per square foot works out to just under $118.
The properties in the portfolio are:
- 1160, 1235, 1253 Red Fox Road, Arden Hills
- 1928, 1950 County Road C W., Roseville
- 1965 County Road C2 W., Roseville
- 565 Shoreview Park Road, Shoreview
- 605 W County Road E., Shoreview
- 1374 E County Road E, Vadnais Heights
- 1700, 1800, 1805, 1825, 1851, 1871 Buerkle Road, White Bear Lake
- 20998 134th Ave., Rogers
Smith and CBRE’s Judd Welliver arranged the deal on behalf of Onward Investors.
According to Smith, Onward raised rents for the portfolio “upwards of 40%” since the purchase in late 2020 and decided that now was the time to sell. Taurus, he said, was attracted to the strength of the metro market, as well as the fact that the average tenant size for the portfolio was 7,000 square feet.
“[We] have a very limited development pipeline, which they believed would help drive continued rent growth,” he said. “They understand that small-bay light industrial is something that is not being reproduced … it’s nearly impossible to recreate this product in these locations and saw that as an ongoing competitive advantage.”
Smith said this investment shows an appetite for investors forking over dollars for Twin Cities real estate and pointed to EQT-Exeter’s $450 million portfolio acquisition as an example of this.
Lathan Allen, a managing director for Taurus, said in an interview with Finance & Commerce that the portfolio is indicative of its other acquisitions, calling it an “average size investment” for the firm.
“It does have some nice scale to it, it has 71 tenants,” he said. “When we buy something like this, we’re looking for a diversification with the tenant base. We typically don’t buy, say, one building where if the tenant goes out it’s a big issue for the overall portfolio. We buy diversification.”
Tenants shouldn’t expect much of a change in building management, he said, since they are already well-managed. There’s potential for Taurus to further invest in the market for a property or properties with a similar profile as the Onward portfolio, according to Allen.
The Twin Cities metro had the fifth-highest sales volume for industrial real estate in the United States in 2024, with $850 million transacted, according to Smith. The metropolitan area with the highest volume was Dallas-Fort Worth at $1 billion.
Onward Investors has become increasingly active in the market. Along with two other buyers, the firm recently bought the Wells Fargo Center in downtown Minneapolis last month for $85 million a steep discount from its 2019 price of $313.6 million. Onward also bought 300 First Ave. N., a downtown Minneapolis office building, in partnership with Willow Peak, a firm that redevelops office properties to mixed-use sites.
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