Rob Sistek of Speed Bay Warehouse Solutions: 5 Questions

Shallow-bay, multi-tenant properties have become a resilient investment in the industrial real estate world, and Speed Bay Warehouse Solutions is focusing on just that.

Founded in 2024 but officially launched last week, Speed Bay is a vertically integrated platform focused solely on shallow-bay, multi-tenant light industrial properties, with approximately 2.7 million square feet already acquired or under control in its portfolio.

For now, the company is focusing on six markets — Phoenix, Dallas-Forth Worth, Tampa, Denver, Orlando and Philadelphia — and serving small to medium-size businesses needing 5,000 to 25,000 square feet of warehouse space. The company is looking to add 11 markets to that original five, though it hasn’t disclosed which. 

Speed Bay, started by Evan Zucker and Jimmy Mulvihill, co-founders of the former real estate investment firm Black Creek Group, has secured $250 million in strategic capital from merchant bank BDT & MSD, as well as $100 million from its founders. 

In their quest to begin the company, Zucker and Mulvihill brought in Rob Sistek as president. Sistek has extensive background in the industrial sector and has held senior roles at Prologis, the Carlyle Group, Westcore Properties, and most recently Silver47 Capital Management.

Commercial Observer sat down with Sistek on Wednesday to discuss Speed Bay’s launch, its investment strategy, and its typical tenants and leases.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Commercial Observer: Speed Bay officially launched last week, but it was founded in 2024 and has 2.7 million square feet of warehouse space in the U.S. How did the idea for the company come together, and what have the last two years been like?

Rob Sistek: From a concept and a strategy standpoint, we started discussing it in 2024. The company was officially formed in terms of its current structure in early 2025.

So the idea for the company originally came together with Jimmy and Evan, the founders of Black Creek Group. When they owned Black Creek, they started to explore various different adjacent sectors, and they were predominantly focused on what are called vault distribution — or industrial properties, as more institutional owners think of it — and they started exploring various different subsectors within industrial. I think industrial outdoor storage (IOS) was one, and multi-tenant light industrial was another.

The operating fundamentals, the strength of the opportunity, and how compelling the sector is, I think, really led them to focus on shallow-bay light industrial. You can build an operating platform that benefits from scale and institutional experience systems, processes that you know can all be combined to generate a compelling return opportunity for investors.

I had previously worked with Evan and Jimmy, and I was part of the team that helped build DCT Industrial. I had most recently been with another fund manager that’s exclusively focused on multi-tenant light industrial, so they reached out to me. Given the attractive fundamentals and what I think is a really compelling investment strategy, we started to have conversations around that, and then really looked at the benefits of creating an institutionalized platform that can focus on this sector.

Have the last two years been a whirlwind? How’s it going?

In a nutshell, it’s going great. It’s been very busy. We’ve grown very quickly.

Jimmy and Evan have a lot of experience building different operating platforms and achieving scale in those platforms. And for us, we were starting from ground zero and building out everything — from initially the investment strategy, the framework for the operating platform, and identifying the target markets that we wanted to be in. We really identified markets where we felt like there was a compelling investment opportunity that’s driven by population demographics, new job growth, new business formation. That was all part of what I would say was the early framework that we put together.

But then once we started to deploy capital, we set up the operating platform separately, and then we started to deploy that into a portfolio. We were fortunate to have really good relationships with BDT & MSD, and we’re able to get that equity commitment lined up, which further accelerated our growth path. 

So it’s been very busy. We went from what was essentially zero employees almost a year ago to over 60 employees today. And we’ve got 2.7 million square feet between our own portfolio and what we have under control, and we’re in five different markets. So we’ve grown very quickly, and it has been very busy.

But it’s been exciting to be able to be part of that, and I think we have a really interesting opportunity in front of us.

BDT & MSD Partners has committed $250 million in capital for Speed Bay’s acquisitions. Can you elaborate on that partnership?

They’ve been a great partner. There was a deep relationship that already existed there, and they’ve been very, very involved in terms of how they got comfortable and interested in the platform. They started investing alongside us in the space, and there was a lot of due diligence on their side that they went through in order to really understand the opportunity and how we were approaching it at Speed Bay.

They’re the anchor investor in the investment vehicle that we’re working on today, and we think that there’s a great road ahead with them.

Why do you think a focus on shallow-bay, smaller properties in the U.S. is beneficial in the long run? How does it compare to investments in larger warehouse properties?

They’re both very compelling investment opportunities. They are different from a physical characteristic standpoint, and even at the operating level with respect to how you manage these assets.

There still could be a very compelling opportunity in bulk distribution, but, for us, we look at the underlying fundamentals and characteristics of shallow-bay space. One of the key items is the lack of new supply that has been generated in the environment recently, where there was a lot of new construction and deliveries and bulk distribution, which created some additional inventory in a lot of the top-tier markets.

Shallow-bay space is very expensive to build. There’s a lot of considerations. It really hasn’t grown from an underlying inventory standpoint the same way bulk distribution has. That has created a persistent supply/demand imbalance, and there’s a tremendous amount of new demand that continues to be attracted to smaller units and industrial parks that have proximity to rooftops, population density and central business districts, all of which are key components to site selection for these small and medium-sized businesses.

We think that supply/demand imbalance is going to be persistent because of the economics around developing new shallow-bay space. We think that creates a really interesting and durable investment strategy to deliver returns for investors.

It’s also more complex from an asset management and a property management standpoint, which has been one of the reasons why it has not been as institutionalized as a lot of the other sectors within the real estate industry. It’s management-intensive, you’ve got a lot of tenants that have a variety of different needs, and you’re serving so many different uses and business needs. 

While it’s intensive from a management standpoint, it’s also really compelling from a resilience standpoint. We think it creates a very attractive risk-adjusted return profile.

What types of tenants are smaller warehouse properties attracting? What do their leases usually look like?

As for the types of businesses, it’s almost as broad as you can think of. I love it.

Construction and materials logistics and distribution are probably the two biggest categories. You do have a lot of what I’ll call e-commerce-related tenants that are doing last-mile delivery or distribution and logistics, particularly in the average unit sizes that we’re focused on, which is kind of the 5,000- to 25,000-square-foot average unit sizes in a multi-tenant building or industrial park.

But those uses range from servicing the nearby rooftops — and that could be HVAC technicians to plumbers, electrical contractors and e-commerce — or it could be advanced manufacturing and assembly of electronic products. It’s very broad and can include almost the entire spectrum of small and medium-sized businesses.

One of the things that is worth mentioning is while two-thirds to three-quarters of the tenancy of these industrial light industrial business parks tend to be small to medium-sized businesses, there is about a third to a quarter of the overall tenant profile that actually includes investment-grade national global tenants that have credit and may have a satellite service center, so there is an element of of that credit tenancy that also exists and wants to be close to population density.

On the structure of the leases, you’ve got relatively short lease terms. Typically upon lease signing, it’s three to five years. Larger units within that size range that I mentioned are more toward five years, but a lot of small to medium-sized businesses don’t have the planning cycles that a lot of the larger companies do, and they’re often looking at expansion plans in the future that have some uncertainty, so they want to have the shorter lease terms in order to be able to have the flexibility for their business.

While the leases are shorter, it gives us an opportunity to really look at the rent and identify mark-to-market rent opportunities. That gives us an opportunity to be able to grow our net operating income more quickly when they’re shorter lease terms.

Isabelle Durso can be reached at idurso@commercialobserver.com.