Howard Schwimmer and Michael Frankel.
Howard Schwimmer and Michael Frankel
Co-CEOs at Rexford Industrial Realty
The industrial market in Southern California has shown signs of slowing lately after years of meteoric growth, particularly in terms of new development, but that still didn’t stop Rexford Industrial Realty from nearly reaching its 2023 investment total just halfway through this year.
The Los Angeles-based firm, one of the largest real estate investment trusts in the nation, is the relative king of SoCal warehouse space, with a 422-property portfolio spanning nearly 50 million rentable square feet. Rexford closed on $1.5 billion worth of investments last year alone, and shows no signs of relenting.
The clearest example is undoubtedly its $1 billion deal with Blackstone in March for 48 properties across L.A. and Orange counties, with a combined total of 3 million square feet. The portfolio was 98 percent leased at the time the deal went through. For dessert, it followed that up with a $27 million purchase of a nearly 87,000-square-foot Orange County property just a few weeks later.
Although not quite reaching the high of its Blackstone deal, the REIT spent about $170 million for 501,000 square feet in the second quarter of this year, with a year-to-date total of $1.3 billion in investments comprising some 3.7 million square feet, according to its second-quarter earnings report. That’s in addition to about $160 million in deals in the pipeline for Rexford within Southern California markets, according to the report.
Much of Rexford’s success has been driven by co-CEOs Howard Schwimmer and Michael Frankel, who this year celebrated their 20th anniversary of partnership at the company. Their secret? An insatiable appetite to find high-quality assets in the country’s largest industrial market.
“[Southern California] is a huge, huge market,” Schwimmer said during the earnings call. “And, frankly, the advantage we have here is really having our team focused on every opportunity, every building. And, so, we really just look at it holistically and uncover those opportunities in the marketplace.”
