MDH Partners Buys $40.1M Fort Lauderdale-Area Warehouse in Sunrise
A decade-old institutional owner cashed out of a fully leased Sunrise warehouse at a price that pencils Broward infill industrial for buyers today.
MDH Partners has bought Sawgrass Distribution Center, a 131,800-square-foot industrial warehouse in Sunrise, in Broward County’s Fort Lauderdale-area industrial market, paying $40.1 million to Clarion Partners in a deal JLL announced closed July 29. The seller was LIT Industrial Limited Partnership, a Clarion Partners affiliate that had held the property for more than a decade, according to CRE Sources’ reporting on the sale.
Why it matters
Institutional sellers rarely disclose exact numbers, so a fully documented trade like this one gives South Florida developers and brokers a real comp instead of an asking-price guess. Clarion Partners, a major New York-based institutional real estate investor, exited a building it had owned more than ten years, and Atlanta-based MDH Partners, an active industrial acquirer nationally, paid up to get in. That combination, a long-hold institutional seller and a specialist buyer, is the clearest signal available right now on where infill Broward industrial pricing has landed.
The numbers
The sale closed at $40.1 million for the 131,800-square-foot building at 770 International Parkway in the Sunrise International Corporate Park, west of downtown Fort Lauderdale. That works out to roughly $304 per square foot. Sawgrass Distribution Center was built in 1989 and renovated in 2020, with seven rear-load bays averaging about 16,475 square feet, 24-foot clear heights and 19 dock-high doors. The property was fully leased at sale, with an average tenant tenure exceeding six years. JLL’s Cody Brais, who led the brokerage team for Clarion Partners, said “the extraordinary level of competition for this asset speaks to the scarcity of well-located industrial properties in Southwest Broward.”
What’s next
MDH Partners has been acquiring warehouse and distribution assets across the country this year, and Broward County’s industrial sales volume had already topped $1 billion by late June, according to CRE Sources. With vacancy in the county’s industrial market still in the mid-single digits, developers underwriting new Broward infill projects now have a fresh, fully sourced price to test their own numbers against.