Walmart buys its Riverside cold-storage facility for $223M

The Real Deal: Walmart's real estate arm paid $223 million for the 507,000-square-foot cold-storage facility at 1001 Columbia Avenue in Riverside, buying out landlord State Street Corporation after 15 years as a tenant. The building carries 42-foot clear height, 98 dock doors, 120 trailer stalls, and 22,500 square feet of office. Walmart plans to keep running temperature-controlled distribution from the site.

The deal cuts against the broader IE industrial picture. Vacancy rose to 8.1% in the first quarter, with 53.6 million square feet sitting empty across the submarket — up sharply from the 1.9 million vacant square feet recorded in Q1 2022, per Colliers. Net absorption hit negative 3.6 million square feet, its third-lowest reading on record.

Cold storage is the exception. JLL's Scott Coyle, who repped Walmart alongside Peter McWilliams and Tim O'Rourke, said demand for temperature-controlled space keeps outrunning supply across the LA basin, and called large-format cold facilities like this one hard to replace. Eastdil Secured repped State Street.