Monmouth Pays $13.4M for New Monroe Build-to-Suit

Monmouth Real Estate Investment Corporation, one of the oldest public equity REITs in the U.S., has acquired a brand new built-to-suit industrial building in the Cincinnati area this month. The New Jersey-based investment company paid $13,416,000 for the property.
  • by   Adrian Maties | Mar 22, 2015

Monmouth Real Estate Investment Corp. has acquired a brand-new build-to-suit industrial building in Monroe. The Freehold, N.J.-based REIT paid $13.4 million for the property.

Located on a 22.4-acre site at 201 Exploration Drive, Monmouth’s new facility is net-leased for 15 years to UGN Inc., an auto parts supplier based in Illinois. The 232,000-square-foot building is expandable by 155,000 square feet, the company said in a statement.

Among the nation’s oldest equity REITs, 47-year-old Monmouth specializes in net-leased industrial properties. Its portfolio comprises 89 assets in 28 states totaling nearly 13 million rentable square feet.

In its recently released outlook for metropolitan Cincinnati, CBRE Group Inc. predicts that the industrial market will continue to expand in 2015, showing improving fundamentals, robust demand and increasing new construction. Developers are expected to deliver between 3 and 4 million square feet of industrial space this year.

Despite the influx of new product, CBRE estimates that strong demand for both Class A and Class B assets will nudge rents up 5 to 10 percent from the current $3.48 per square foot.