Overton Moore Buys Aerospace and Defense Site in LA’s South Bay

The property at 1600 West 135th Street in Gardena is fully leased to Avcorp, an aerospace and defense firm that works with firms like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. However, Overton Moore plans to put the site up for lease and potentially pursue entitlements for two new industrial buildings with a combined 242,000 square feet to supplant the current structures.

The industrial sector has famously soared through the pandemic as existing momentum from the e-commerce sector was amplified. Rexford Industrial Realty recently acquired a 27-acre tech campus in South Bay for approximately $182 million, and a partnership of Staley Point Capital and Bain Capital paid $34.5 million for a 135,000-square-foot South Bay industrial property.

“The sale of the Gardena campus shows the continued and insatiable appetite from investors to acquire large-scale, infill industrial sites, most specifically in the South Bay submarket,” Mike Condon Jr., a vice chairman at Cushman & Wakefield, which will also market the property for lease.

“At the outset of the marketing process, our team predicted a full scrape and redevelopment of the site to modern industrial. But, through the process, [Overton Moore] took notice of an emerging trend towards production and an influx of research and development tech tenants that can potentially reuse the existing high bay and bow truss improvements. We are excited at the opportunity to chase a few unique users before pivoting the leasing focus to more traditional industrial users, and the in-place lease affords us some time to be creative in our pursuit of a unicorn tenant.”

Cushman & Wakefield’s Condon, Erica Finck, Bailey Dawson, Brittany Winn and McKenna Gaskill represented the seller. 

Gregory Cornfield can be reached at gcornfield@commercialobserver.com.