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Stonemont Financial

PRESS / November 15, 2021

Stonemont enters Charleston market with groundbreaking of new industrial development

The firm’s acquisition of 100 acres at Omni Industrial Campus builds off recent success in other port markets as industrial demand booms

Stonemont Financial Group, a private real estate investment firm specializing in industrial development and net lease assets, announced today that it has broken ground on three new industrial buildings on a 100-acre parcel of land at the Omni Industrial Campus in Summerville, South Carolina. Through a partnership with Clarius Partners, Stonemont is developing a build-to-suit manufacturing facility and two additional speculative buildings on the land, which sits less than 25 miles from the Port of Charleston. Totaling 1.3 million square feet of industrial warehouse space, the buildings are expected to reach substantial completion by Fall 2022.

Omni Industrial Campus is a Class A, 221-acre business park located along Omni Industrial Boulevard in Charleston’s I-26 distribution corridor. In June, Stonemont acquired the land with plans to develop three speculative industrial buildings. Immediately following acquisition, Stonemont signed a lease with Thorne HealthTech, Inc, a science-driven wellness company, to develop a 360,320-square-foot build-to-suit facility. The additional two speculative industrial facilities total 364,700 square feet and 606,880 square feet and are strategically designed for e-commerce or logistics users.

The project marks the first venture for Stonemont in the Charleston MSA as the firm continues to prioritize markets with direct access to ports and a heavy infrastructure base. Stonemont currently is underway on Phase II at the Georgia International Trade Center, a 1,150-acre industrial park near the Port of Savannah, and Southwest International Gateway Business Park, a rail-served industrial park in El Campo, Texas, which sits close to nearby ports including the Port of Houston and the Port of Lazaro in Mexico.

“Our projects in Savannah and El Campo provide a playbook for success in Charleston, which is a market that will continue to strengthen its reach and influence in the decade ahead,” said Zack Markwell, Managing Principal and CEO at Stonemont Financial Group. “We are already fielding interest on both speculative buildings and look forward to maintaining this positive momentum as Stonemont continues to leverage its investment and planning expertise for developing world-class facilities that are equipped to handle the fast-changing needs of today’s e-commerce and logistics users.”

The Port of Charleston is the fourth largest port on the East Coast, handling 4% of all U.S. container volume according to JLL. The port has seen its most active year yet in 2021, with healthy growth spurring an even more lucrative year for industrial development around the Charleston metro area. In Q2 of this year, vacancy rates rested at 2.96%, a record-low for the area with construction activity doubling to 4.3 million square feet from early 2020. This dramatic increase is a result of an ongoing surge in e-commerce demand, with Charleston’s low cost of business, strong labor pool and direct access to a major port positioning it as a top player in the national industrial development scene. The majority of development activity within the past couple of years has taken place in the Jedburg-Ridgeville-Summerville submarket, which is land constrained due to wetlands as well as municipality owned and residentially zoned land.

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