Cushman & Wakefield Arranges 60,000 SF Distribution Center Lease for Automotive Supplier

26 Jul, 2011, Newark, Del.

DYK Automotive, LLC has signed a lease for 60,000 square feet at Pencader Business Park, 650 Pencader Drive, Newark, Del. The automotive aftermarket supplier will utilize the site as its Northeast distribution center. DYK was represented by the team of R. Kemp Conrad of Cushman & Wakefield/Commercial Advisors, LLC of Memphis; Ernest Felici and John Birmingham of the Wilmington, Del. office of Cushman & Wakefield; and Gerard Blinebury and Leah Balerno of the firm's Philadelphia office. Landlord Emerald Lake LLC was represented in-house.

"We considered sites in central Pennsylvania and ultimately chose Delaware with its transportation access," said Felici. "DYK Automotive also required a specialized building to store flammables. This particular building formerly housed a paint distributor, so it already had the proper sprinkler system and other specifications needed in a second-generation building."

"This was a unique requirement involving a component of product storage that was difficult to meet from a code perspective," said Blinebury. "Given the product storage, it became difficult to find municipal cooperation in our initial search. Newark, Del. provided the right combination in terms of the right building and the ability to meet local code requirements."

The lease at 650 Pencader Drive, a 125,000-square-foot, one-story building on 15 acres, constructed in 2000, follows three other transactions completed in the past six months by Cushman & Wakefield, which represents DYK exclusively. They include a 160,000-square-foot renewal for the company's central distribution center in Memphis, a 90,000-square-foot distribution center in Mira Loma, Cal., and a renewal for the company's headquarters offices in Germantown, Tenn.

"When we acquired the company in 2008, all of our leases were coming due," says Don Youngblood, president and CEO of DYK Automotive, the parent company of three aftermarket entities. "We brought Kemp Conrad and his team on board, and they have done an excellent job of representing us nationally, renegotiating existing leases and completing renewals on our behalf. The new site in Newark, Del. is the fourth warehouse in our system."

"It is a tenants' market right now, and we have been able to lock in good, long-term rates in these transactions," said Conrad.

Cushman & Wakefield, Inc.'s industrial brokerage platform provides global resources for tenant and landlord representation, disposition and acquisition services, transaction management, and industrial consulting including labor and demographic analysis. In 2010, this group completed more than 4,800 industrial real estate transactions nationwide - totaling 141.6 million square feet in leases and 52.9 million square feet in sales - with an aggregate value of nearly $5 billion. This represented a year-over-year revenue increase of 26.7 percent.

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