NorthPoint industrial developments still taking off like rockets

It’s getting hard to keep up with NorthPoint Development’s industrial market expansion, which over the company’s brief five-year history has accounted for 28 million square feet of development in properties across the Kansas City area and beyond.

NorthPoint recently signed its largest tenant to date at its first major industrial development, Riverside Horizons, a 300-acre park at Interstate 635 and Missouri 9 in Riverside. Progress Rail, a subsidiary of Caterpillar that supplies railroad and transit system projects, has leased 250,000 square feet in Riverside Horizons.

Brent Miles, NorthPoint’s vice president of economic development, said Riverside Horizons took off like a rocket. Five buildings totaling more than 1.8 million square feet have opened there over the past five years, he said, and only 68,000 square feet of that space remains vacant.

Meanwhile, three more industrial rockets have taken off for NorthPoint in the Kansas City area.

The largest, of course, is Logistics Park Kansas City in Edgerton, which NorthPoint is developing on 1,500 acres surrounding BNSF Railway’s $250 million intermodal freight hub. Since 2013, NorthPoint has completed 7 million square feet of Class A industrial space at LPKC, which has capacity for 17 million square feet.

In July, NorthPoint announced it had leased 1.3 million square feet at LPKC as a result of expansions by Smart Warehousing, Jet.com and Excel Industries.

That followed Amazon.com’s March announcement that it would occupy an entire 822,104-square-foot structure in LPKC, which at the time of its completion was the Kansas City area’s largest industrial building ever constructed on a speculative basis, meaning before a tenant was secured. The new spec record also was set in LPKC, with the completion of a 927,000-square-foot building there late last year.

NorthPoint has also been busy at Three Trails Industrial Park, a 1.2 million-square-foot development on 180 acres at 87th Street between Interstates 49 and 435 in south Kansas City.

“That was a foreclosed, mined piece of property,” Miles said, “and we will wrap up the last of the three buildings there within two years this April.

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