A 57,600-square-foot industrial park consisting of six buildings at 8391-8499 Littleton Road in North Fort Myers sold for $6,943,000. Excelsior Littleton Road LLC, an arm of Nashville, Tennessee-based Excelsior Capital, made the purchase.

Cushman & Wakefield Commercial Property Southwest Florida CEO and Principal Broker Gary Tasman and Shawn Stoneburner represented the seller, GBA Littleton 57 LLC, which bought the industrial park in 2020 for $2.9 million. “This was an opportunity that we’ve identified in the marketplace where the contract rents were measurably below the market rents. So, we went in and found that opportunity,” Tasman said. “We identified an investor that could buy the property. We executed the strategy of overseeing and doing the capital improvements and then also raising the rents or replacing the tenants who could pay. And then we created that value and sold from that investor to another investor.”

The buyer has long-term, stable tenants in place, Tasman said. With Cushman & Wakefield managing the property, he added the buyer could hold onto the investment for up to 10 years depending on market conditions.

It marked the end of Cushman & Wakefield’s investment sales for the year. Tasman said the end-of-the-year push forward in sales reminds him a lot of 2019. He said it could be the uncertainty of tax law changes that pushed a lot of the 2022 demand into 2021.

He speculated many investors sought to cash out and reload for next year. “There’s over 7 million square feet of buildings being built for businesses that plan to occupy. It’s not speculative investment, it’s a work in progress to put businesses in place,” Tasman said. “That against a 32-million-square-foot industrial market, that’s a really, really big ascending growth in (Southwest Florida’s) industrial market size. And it represents over 60,000 jobs. If that really is the beginning, this may be a new plateau. And it may have nothing to do with that pull-forward demand.”