Whirlpool Corp. has signed a 10-year lease to occupy the Perris Distribution Center at the northeast corner of Perris Boulevard and Morgan Street, said Sam Foster, senior vice president with Jones Lang LaSalle, a Los Angeles real estate firm.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
Foster negotiated Whirlpool's lease with the building's developer, IDS Real Estate Group in Los Angeles.
Whirlpool employees began moving into their new facility during the first week of November. The building, which was finished in August, is expected to be fully occupied by the middle of next year.
About 300 people are expected to work there, Foster said.
All of the employees are being moved from two warehouse-distribution facilities in Ontario and one in Mira Loma. Benton Harbor, Mich.-based Whirlpool leased more than 1.5 million square feet of logistics space in those three cities, Foster said.
Whirlpool, which purchased Maytag Corp. for $1.79 billion on March 2006, is building 10 large warehouse-distribution facilities, including the Perris operation, in North America.
"They're restructuring their entire distribution system," Foster said. "Getting everything under one roof in each region will be a lot more efficient."
The Perris facility will serve the southwest United States, Foster said.
Whirlpool officials originally wanted to build their own distribution facility on 80 acres that was served by rail, but changed their plans when such a site became too difficult to find.
"It's almost impossible to find a site like that anywhere in the Los Angeles area," Foster said. "We looked in Barstow, but by then Whirlpool decided they would be better off locating in the basin."
Perris Distribution Center is about one-quarter mile south of March Air Reserve Base within the Interstate 215 corridor, a hotbed for development of large warehouse-distribution projects. Walgreens pharmacies and Ross Dress for Less have major logistics facilities in that area.
Perris Distribution Center was developed by IDS Real Estate Group in Los Angeles and is the largest speculative warehouse-distribution project ever built in the United States, said Murad Siam, IDS Real Estate's co-chief executive officer.
IDS Real Estate spent about $4 million on infrastructure improvements. "The way it is now, it's hard to move people around out there," Siam said.
"All of that came out of our own pocket," Siam said.
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