Area Development
Commercial real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield | Commercial Advisors has completed a 900,000-square-foot industrial lease with Target, which will spend $50 million to reposition 5461 Davidson Road, as a regional online fulfillment center, in Memphis, Tennessee.

Located near Memphis International Airport and Lamar/Hwy. 78, 5461 Davidson Road features 30-foot clear ceiling heights. Formerly home to Hamilton Beach, the property had been recently utilized for seasonal requirements prior to Cushman & Wakefield-Commercial Advisors’ lease transaction with Target.

Hiring for the new distribution center is expected to start early next year, with the facility slated to begin operation by mid-2015. The facility will be managed for Target by Innotrac, a 3PL vendor, and will service the southeastern United States.

The property owner, an asset management and investment firm, was represented in the transaction by Patrick Walton and Kemp Conrad, SIOR with Cushman & Wakefield-Commercial Advisors in Memphis. Target was represented by Patrick Burke of CBRE.

“This project is a great Christmas present to the Memphis region and starts 2015 on a very positive note,” said Walton, noting that the distribution center is expected to generate more than 400 new jobs in Shelby County. “Labor played a major role for choosing Memphis…Target’s site selection decision may also herald a growing trend in e-commerce distribution in the mid-south region. “It’s not necessarily a same-day requirement, but a more regionalized approach,” he explained.

“In the past three years, users like Amazon and Walmart have invested in major tier-one markets and population centers to set up same-day or next-day delivery,” said Conrad, president of Cushman & Wakefield-Commercial Advisors Asset Services. “As those primary networks are built out, secondary regional investment will come next. Memphis is the perfect location to serve a large swath of the country for non time-sensitive catalog services.”

“Memphis is America’s distribution center because it is so centrally located,” added Conrad. “We can reach 75 percent of the country’s population within a three-day truck drive and we’re quadrimodal – meaning a nexus of logistical infrastructure including rail, roadways, runways and river.”