With a new Amazon facility already going up on a nearby site, Imperial Land Corp. has another major player to build a new development project on its land holdings in Findlay Township.
This time it’s a company that ranks as the largest industrial property developer in the country over the past five years — Kansas City-based NorthPoint Development, which closed this week on buying a 26-acre site from Imperial Land on which it has already started site work to build a new 276,000-square-foot industrial building.
Tim McElroy, director of industrial development for NorthPoint, said the company was drawn here by Pittsburgh’s economy. NorthPoint is starting its first project here while also pushing forward to buy a second site from Imperial Land for another development project to follow.
“We like the fundamentals. We like the diverse economy that Pittsburgh has,” he said. “It checked all of our boxes.”
McElroy described the company’s first project here, which is being built on a speculative basis, as a bit smaller than it usually builds. NorthPoint has developed more than 107 million square feet of industrial buildings throughout the country in the past nine years, accumulating a growing roster of major corporations as tenants along the way, including Amazon.com Inc., Walmart Inc., GE, GM, Ford, FexEx, UPS and many others.