Thor completes hat trick of NJ industrial acquisitions

Thor Equities continued a push into New Jersey’s industrial real estate market with its third purchase in the state this year, a 330,000-square-foot property in Passaic.

Joe Sitt’s firm bought the warehouse at 153 Linden Street for $52 million, the company said Friday. Waitex Group was the seller.

The warehouse’s proximity to transportation and population made it an appealing target. It is less than five minutes from Route 21 and is 13 miles north of Newark Liberty International Airport. It also has direct access to the Port of Newark, the second-largest port in the country. The location is within an hour’s drive of most of New Jersey and New York City, among the nation’s most populous regions.

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Thor principal Joe Sitt said the asset would help the company “access millions of consumers on the East Coast in record time” as it expands its footprint.

Sitt’s firm has bought two other properties in New Jersey this year. In February, Thor secured a Newark warehouse of 131,000 square feet for $32 million. In March, it picked up a 150,000-square-foot industrial building in Bogota for $50 million.

The Passaic investment was Thor’s fourth domestic industrial buy of the summer. The company began its shopping spree in June with a 525,000-square-foot property in Savannah, Georgia, for $49 million. It splurged on a 159,000-square-foot warehouse at the southern edge of L.A. County for $85 million in July. Then it snapped up 13 industrial assets in Tampa, Florida, totaling 402,000 square feet, for $37.3 million.

Warehouse space has been increasingly hard to come by in recent years, with occupancy rates well over 90 percent in many markets and warehouses being leased before they are even built. Availability in the New Jersey industrial market — one of the biggest in the nation, thanks to the state’s many highways and Port Elizabeth — has been close to zero for a while.

The strong economy and rise of e-commerce were major factors in the run-up, but rising interest rates and gains by in-person retail, along with a pullback by Amazon, have started to slow the growth of industrial rents.