Enclave's Alabama DST asks $9.3 million for one tenant's lease

Enclave has acquired Trade Distribution Center, a 235,000-square-foot warehouse at 2400 Trade Drive in Cullman, Ala., and is opening a Delaware statutory trust around it with capacity for up to $9.3 million in equity from accredited investors, including buyers working through 1031 exchanges. Divided by the square footage, that capacity comes to a little under $40 a foot — the first hint that the land basis is the least interesting thing in the deal.

The asset itself is standard-issue in the useful sense: 11.88 acres along Interstate 65 in North Alabama's manufacturing corridor, 36-foot clear heights, 31 overhead doors — the specification large-scale distribution requires. RESRG Automotive, a tier 1 supplier feeding production for Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Mazda, Honda, Hyundai and Kia, fully occupies it under a lease the announcement describes as long-term, and the building abuts RESRG's main plant, an adjacency the offering frames as mission-critical to the supplier's southeastern operations.

Nothing here changes the arithmetic of single-tenant net lease: it is a credit instrument with a warehouse attached. The investors buying into this trust are not underwriting Cullman industrial rents or the corridor's freight position; they are underwriting RESRG's balance sheet for the life of a lease, with the automakers one step removed from the rent check. That distance is the trade.

That puts Enclave on one side of the industrial repricing PWD has been tracking: industrial capital is now paying for land, credit and freight position rather than rent rolls, and the sector's real spread has opened between assets priced on lease term and assets priced on optionality. A 1031-eligible DST is the purest lease-term product available — it exists because exchangers are on a statutory clock and need replacement property, and that captive demand lets a sponsor price to the exchange buyer rather than to the cap-rate market. The buyer gets a return set by the lease, the sponsor gets certainty of execution, and neither gets paid for what North Alabama land does next.

The size is the tell: a $9.3 million raise is one building's worth of capital, not a program's, which suggests Enclave is testing the DST channel rather than scaling a vehicle. If the offering fills quickly, a second one follows, because that is how sponsors learn whether their retail distribution can carry their acquisition pipeline.

Chief investment officer Josh Wilcox framed the purchase as a milestone in Enclave's platform expansion, and the DST is where that expansion gets financed — but the number that should matter most to a buyer is the one the announcement omits: how much lease term remains. For a deal whose entire case rests on a tier 1 supplier's credit, that term is the pricing.