Cushman & Wakefield arranges $6M sale of vacant Union City cold storage building

Cushman & Wakefield arranged the $6 million sale of 609 10th St., a vacant industrial and cold-storage building in Union City, New Jersey, from 10th St Realty, LLC to PanRaj Holding, LLC, with Andrew Schwartz, Jordan Sobel, André Balthazard and Dan Bottiglieri representing both sides, according to Connect CRE.

The building sits on 0.81 acres and holds 33,515 square feet of ground-floor industrial space, with a second floor and a basement lifting total usable area to 42,451 square feet. Cold storage, manufacturing, dry storage and office space fill it, served by interior loading docks and multiple drive-in doors.

Divided into the $6 million price, the usable area works out to roughly $141 a square foot; counting only the ground floor, it is closer to $179, and which figure applies depends on how much of the upper and lower levels a cold-chain operator can put to work. Vacancy cuts both ways in a trade this size: an empty building costs the seller taxes, insurance and maintenance with no rent coming in, which tends to soften the price, while a buyer who intends to occupy gets a facility to configure instead of a lease to inherit.

Sobel made the supply case for the location, saying 609 10th St. gave an owner-user the chance to buy a vacant industrial facility in an exceptionally supply-constrained spot minutes from Midtown Manhattan, and that its existing infrastructure, functional layout and connectivity to the New York metro region suited the buyer's needs. That is the same scarcity logic this publication has tracked in larger industrial portfolios, where frozen construction starts have pushed buyers toward buildings whose entitlement and infrastructure already exist.

Six million dollars is small against the industrial volumes Cushman & Wakefield handles—Cushman & Wakefield's own robotaxi leasing data, reported by Bisnow, showed four companies signing nearly 1 million square feet of that space this year—and cold storage narrows the buyer pool further, since refrigeration demands power, insulation and equipment that dry warehouse does not, and the operator usually has to be in the cold chain already. A single owner-user purchase of a vacant building says little about where cold-chain pricing is heading overall. The next vacant refrigerated building to trade in the New York metro will test whether $141 a usable foot draws another owner-user, or whether the bid was specific to one operator's process.