business

7401 CAHILL ROAD

7401 Cahill Road, Edina

Type: Industrial

Area: 45,800 square feet

Buyer: Welsh Companies

Seller: Dexus Property Group

Price: $2.4 million

Details: The Twin Cities commercial real estate firm Welsh Companies continues to add choice industrial properties to its investment portfolio, with the latest one being 7401 Cahill Road in Edina, a 40-year-old building probably best known as a former home of medical patch maker LecTec Corp.

Welsh purchased the 45,800-square-foot building for $2.4 million in November from Australia's Dexus Property Group. In recent years, the facility was owned by Boston-based Cabot Properties Inc. and managed by RREEF Leasing and Property Management.

Ryan Doyle, senior acquisitions associate for Welsh Companies, said the Edina purchase was the second industrial property acquired for Welsh Real Estate Fund IV, one of a series of real estate investment trusts set up by subsidiary WelshInvest. The fund's first acquisition came last summer with the purchase of a 234,000-square-foot office/warehouse property in Fond du Lac, Wis.

More such acquisitions are coming in the near future, Doyle said.

"7401 Cahill fits our criteria in what we're looking for in industrial properties," he said. "It's a multi-tenant, lower-finish industrial product that is 100 percent leased, with the leases still several years out from their renewal dates.

"But the biggest driver for this purchase was its Edina location, near Interstate 494 and Bush Lake Road. From an industrial property point of view, that's really about as good as it gets in the Twin Cities. Throughout its history, there never has been much of an issue in getting it leased up," he said.

The single-story, steel frame and concrete building was built in 1979 and is situated on a 3.2-acre lot, a mile north of the I-494/Bush Lake Road interchange. Nearly 10,000 square feet of its space is configured as offices.

Cabot Properties had purchased the facility in 1999, along with Select Comfort Corporation's former headquarters on Trenton Lane N. in Plymouth and two other Twin Cities properties, as part of the 1.26-million-square-foot Rushmore Plaza Partners Portfolio.

DON JACOBSON

Don Jacobson, a freelance writer based in St. Paul, can be contacted at hotproperty.startribune@gmail.com.