Blackstone buys in St. Paul's Beacon Bluff.

Byline: Matt M. Johnson

It seems that the Blackstone Group has begun hunting down Twin Cities industrial properties one at a time.

The New York-based investor paid $10.25 million for an 87,038-square-foot logistics warehouse building at 955 Wells St. in St. Paul, according to a certificate of real estate made public on Jan. 3. The warehouse is one of the newest entries into the Beacon Bluff Business Center that the St. Paul Port Authority redeveloped on the site of 3M's former St. Paul campus over the past few years. The site is just northeast of downtown St. Paul.

Blackstone makes the purchase after acquiring a massive chunk of local industrial real estate over the past year. The company paid a record-breaking $247.2 million in cash last April for 34 industrial properties throughout the Twin Cities containing 2.245 million square feet of space, and in September picked up an additional 18 Twin Cities properties spanning 2.8 million square feet in a $5.9 million purchase of Colony Industrial, the warehouse unit of Los Angeles-based Colony Capital.

Minnetonka-based Opus Group completed Beacon Bluff Business Center building in late 2018. Opus sited the speculative warehouse on 5.71 acres of land it purchased from the Port Authority for $996,653.

The Beacon Bluff sale, which closed on Dec. 23, works out to $117.76 per square foot of space. Ramsey County values the property at $1.1 million for tax purposes.

Though far less expensive than Blackstone's other recent Twin Cities acquisitions, the Beacon Bluff deal didn't come completely out of the blue, said Judd Welliver, an executive vice president with the Minneapolis office of CBRE.

"I wasn't surprised," he said in a Tuesday interview. "I've seen them actively bid on a number of offerings regardless of size."

Welliver, along with CBRE colleagues Ryan Watts, Sonja Dusil, Tom Holtz and Bentley Smith, represented Opus in the transaction.

Brokers at the Twin Cities office of Colliers International, which shepherded Blackstone's April portfolio buy, have been expecting...

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