CenterPoint Properties Trust and Wispark LLC plan to build a 417,384-square-foot speculative industrial building in LakeView Corporate Park in Pleasant Prairie.
The companies submitted plans to the village plan commission for a speculative warehouse and distribution building on a 26.2-acre, vacant site at the northeast corner of 80th Avenue and Springbrook Road.
At this time, there is no identified user for the building. The property is zoned manufacturing.
CenterPoint officials did not return phone calls or emails.
CenterPoint is a national developer headquartered in Oak Brook, Ill., and Wisparkis the development arm of WEC Energy Group.
In 2015, the two firms as partners finished two spec buildings in the park, one with 412,000 square feet and the second with 520,000. The larger building was leased to Uline while it was under construction and the smaller building was sold to Milwaukee-based Midwest Refrigerated Services.
CenterPoint also built a 471,360-square-foot facility in LakeView Corporate Park for Ta Chen International Inc., a distributor of stainless, aluminum and nickel alloy coils, sheets and plates that moved its facility from Gurnee, Ill. to Pleasant Prairie.
Kenosha County has been a hot spot for industrial development for years, but all speculative commercial real estate development dropped dramatically after the Great Recession. For awhile, Milwaukee-based real estate firm Zilber Ltd. was the only company building spec industrial buildings in the Kenosha area until CenterPoint and Wispark started working together a couple of years ago, said Trent Poole of CBRE.
“There was a little bit of a void from 2010 to 2014,”Poole said. “Zilber was doing it, but they were doing smaller stuff, 50,000 to 60,000 square feet at that time.”
Zilber recently completed a 173,165-square-foot spec industrial building in the Business Park of Kenosha. It was the seventh spec industrial project by Zilber in Kenosha County in the last seven years.
Chicago-based First Industrial Realty Trust Inc. is working on its first project in the Village of Somers’ new business park, FirstPark 94 – a 600,000-square-foot industrial spec warehouse, currently under construction.
“There has been a lot of growth down (in Kenosha County), with companies moving north (from Illinois),” Poole said. “There is also the Uline factor, which has been a phenomenal story. In addition to the 2 million square feet they own, they’ve also leased 1 million square feet. Amazon gets a lot of press, but the Uline story is bigger.”
