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The Hunt family had owned their own industrial park for a long time, steadily building it up over the years. When it came time to sell, they weren’t initially satisfied with the offers they were getting. In the end, it took some owner financing to make the deal work.
The Hunt Industrial Park, located midway between Groveland and Minneola in south Lake County, recently sold for $28 million. The 200,000-square-foot park, a collection of small bay industrial buildings, is fully occupied by tenants. The buyer was Midtown Capital Partners, a real estate investment firm based in Miami.
Foundry Commercial, a real estate brokerage based in Orlando, secured the deal. Senior Vice President Lawson Dann and Justin B. Ruby, a principal in the firm, helped make it happen. They were able to achieve a 4.9% cap rate through seller financing, running a process that moved the selling price up from the mid-$20-million range to the high bid of $28 million.
Dann recounted how the deal came together:
“The Hunt family has owned this park and has grown it to what it is today, with over 100 tenants. It’s very small bay, and 100% occupied,” Dann said. “There was strong interest in the market for it. However, to get the owner’s price, we had to get creative.”
The industrial park is located at 15430 County Road 565A, north of State Road 50, midway between Groveland and Minneola. The Hunt family had been clients of his previously, Dann said. Recently, the Hunts got an unexpected offer.
“They had gotten an unsolicited offer on the property and came to me to discuss this offer,” Dann said. “We decided, maybe I’ll see what’s going on out there in the market.”
The family has had a long-term relationship with a lot of their tenants, he said. They didn’t want to put up a “for sale” sign and go through the trouble of bringing in prospective buyers for tours if the eventual offers turned out not to be strong enough.
“They had a number in mind. In the current financing constraints, we realized a lot of the offers were under what their expectations were,” Dann said.
The buyer ended up purchasing the property with the help of some owner financing, he said.
“Under the current financing world which is very tough out there, bank lending is very tight,” Dann said. “The best way to bring these parties together to achieve what the seller wanted was for that seller to do some owner financing for a short period of time to get through the constraints of the lending market.”
“A lot of banks are not lending. It’s very tough to get lending out there right now in the capital markets investment world.”
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