Highest Price Ever for a Refrigerated Warehouse Building

Higest Price Ever for a Refrigerated    Warehouse Building.




Highest Price Ever for a Refrigerated Warehouse Building.


The highest price ever paid for a refrigerated warehouse building occurred in November, 2010 in St. Louis City, Missouri. The facility was a 23,655 ft.² multiple temperature warehouse facility with freezer warehouse, coolerwarehouse and ambient temperature or dry warehouse storage space. The refrigerated building was situated on 2 acres of property. The building was originally constructed in 1951 as a truck terminal. It was later converted into a foodservice distribution facility which required the installation of freezer space and cooler warehouse storage space. There was a low cieling 5,500 ft.² of freezer warehouse and 1,000 ft.² of cooler warehouse space in the refrigerated foodservice building. The refrigerated foodservice facility was located at 1717 North Broadway, St. Louis, Missouri 63102. The location was just north of the downtown St. Louis City central business district corridor.

The St. Louis metropolitan area is a 2 state Metropolitan area which is bisected by the Mississippi River. The downtown St. Louis area is adjacent to the Mississippi River. There is only one significant bridge connecting the Missouri and Illinois portions of the Metropolitan St. Louis area is located in the downtown area. The bridge is known as the Popular Street Bridge. The Poplar Street Bridge provides the convergence of 5 different interstate highways, which creates excessive demand on that bridge and its approaches during multiple traffic peak utilization periods during any day, such as morning and evening rush hour traffic or major professional sporting events. The Missouri Department of Transportation (MDOT) and the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) decided that a second bridge was necessary for the downtown St. Louis area to alleviate these traffic bottleneck problems for the over utilized bridge. The refrigerated foodservice building at 1717 North Broadway set right in the way.

The refrigerated building was owned by M&L Frozen Foods. M&L Frozen Foods is a full line foodservice company http://www.mlfoodstl.com/ This privately held company has been in business for more than 100 years. M &L Frozen Foods purchased the building in 1982 and added the refrigerated cold storage capacity. The location provided excellent access to the downtown high-rise office building district and also a significant number of restaurants and hotels and several casinos, as well as a national convention center. There are 3 major professional sports franchises that have their arenas or stadiums only a few miles from this refrigerated foodservice facility. M & L Frozen Foods’ location was vital to this customer base because of their immediate proximity to all of those businesses and provides immediate availability and weekend access to this restaurant, sporting, hostility and entertainment submarket located in the downtown corridor.

Immediately there became a vast discrepancy between the Department of Transportation for the State of Missouri and their determination of value for the refrigerated foodservice facility and M &L Frozen Foods’ expectation of compensation. M & L Frozen Foods needed a refrigerated warehouse building with freezer and cooler temperature capabilities that was adjacent to that downtown corridor to move into so they could keep their customer base which relied on M&L’s proximity. There were no existing industrial warehouse facilities with refrigerated cold storage warehouse space available adjacent to St. Louis’s downtown corridor. M & L conducted a search for public taking and land valuation attorney to assist them in their eminent domain case with the Missouri Department of Transportation.

The owners of M&L Frozen Foods selected Denlow & Henry http://www.denlow.com/ This law firm works exclusively with eminent domain and condemnation. Robert Denlow was the condemnation attorney for this landmark refrigerated cold storage eminent domain litigation case. Robert Denlow is nationally recognized within professional organizations and speaks nationally and internationally on the topic of eminent domain and condemnation. Robert Denlow can be reached at 314-725-5151 or rdenlow@denlow.com Denlow employed as his expert on refrigerated cold storage, Jim Cronin, a real estate broker of Hawk Distribution Services, LLC http://www.hawkds.com/ Jim Cronin can be reached at 314-994-0577 or j.cronin@hawkds.com


Condemnation is the right of the government to take property for public use and provide just compensation for that property; however no one is required to pay more than their fair share when private property is taken for public use. Through the expert and skilled leadership of Robert Denlow, as well as the determination of M&L Frozen Foods’ principal, Lenny Toco, the court system ultimately realized that a refrigerated facility near the proximity of an existing customer base was the essence of this 100-year-old family-owned business.

The courts awarded $5,300,000.00 or $224.00 a square foot for 1717 North Broadway.

Types Of Refrigerated Warehouse Freezer Floors

Refrigerated warehouse freezer building floors.


A refrigerated warehouse building is basically an industrial warehouse facility with the capability of providing interior temperatures of 65° or less in all or a portion of the building. One often overlooked or misunderstood fact about these specialized buildings is when there is a need to provide underfloor heating.

The need for underfloor heating is entirely derived by the subsoil temperature. Whenever the temperature below any floor begins to freeze, pressure develops upward from the expansion of that frozen water that is in the soil beneath the concrete warehouse floor. The lower the temperature above the floor the further the cold will penetrate downward into the subsoil below the floor. The further down the freezing occurs the larger the volume of water that will be frozen and the greater the total amount of upward pressure on the warehouse floor. In order to alleviate the pressure on the floor that from freezing of water and moisture in the soil below the warehouse floor certain types of defrosting mechanisms can be used.

There are 3 types of defrosting apparatus that can be installed in the construction process of a refrigerated warehouse facility that has freezer temperature capabilities. Those types are forced air, glycol and electric heat. Forced air defrosting is provided by piping that runs through the cement warehouse floor and allows ambient outside air or forced heated air through that piping to prevent subsoil moisture freezing. Glycol is a mechanical system that pumps a heated antifreeze type of liquid through a plumbing system within the cement floor to prevent subsurface soil freezing. Electric heating is provided by a providing heat to the warehouse floor through a heating system utilizing electric generated heat underneath the cement of the warehouse floor.

There is much debate as to which of the 3 types are the most efficient way of preventing subsurface pressure and floor heaving caused by freezer warehouse space maintained at less than 32°. Many factors are incorporated into deciding which of the 3 types is appropriate when constructing a refrigerated warehouse facility. Typically glycol systems are for very large warehouse facilities that have extremely low storage temperatures. Forced air systems work well in buildings that are in warmer climates or warehouse floors are above grade. Electric defrosting of freezer warehouse floors are best with interior modular insulated panel installations into existing warehouse structures or with new buildings with small or medium-sized amounts of freezer warehouse storage areas.

When evaluating the purchase of an existing refrigerated cold storage is best to evaluate the floor will frosting system as part of the due diligence required when purchasing a temperature controlled facility. Hawk Distribution Services http://www.hawkds.com/ has over 25 years of experience as a licensed real estate broker in assisting buyers of industrial refrigerated real estate.

Refrigerated Meat Processing Buildings How they Sell and Lease.

Refrigerated Meat Processing Facilities.

There are basically two types of refrigerated meat processing facilities. A meat processing facility is either a livestock kill operation or a further processing facility.Howerer both are inspected by the USDA

The first type is where beef and pork companies operate their livestock killing operations. These facilities are always located in rural or agricultural industrial real estate marketplaces. Historically these facilities did not have connections to municipal water and sewer systems because they were located so far away from the nearest town. Also the water demands of the facility sometimes were larger than the entire capacity of the nearest town’s water system. Sometimes the livestock kill facilities discharges into the sewer system was beyond the capabilities of the nearest municipality which resulted in wastewater settling ponds at the site. This was problematic in real estate brokerage because of environmental issues sometimes resulted at the facility site from these wastewater settling ponds. These problems revolved around that the facility had to maintain its own water and sewer systems, and therefore any environmental ramifications remained at the site after operations had ceased. These were also truly specialized buildings and not always easily adaptable to alternative users. Resale of the property to another livestock kill operator most likely would not usually occur because the current owners did not wish to sell to their competition. Also depending on the age of the plant, the processing process and systems had become inefficient for livestock kill operations. Further there has been reluctance for any grandfathered inspection criteria items to be passed on to a new purchaser of the aging livestock slaughter facilities.

The second type of facility was a refrigerated further processing facility. This facility could have been in any type or size of industrial real estate market. The refrigerated facility processed beef and pork carcasses. This processing is known in the food processing industry as "further processing". The products that were produced in these facilities are extremely varied as the many types of foods you would see in any supermarket or in a restaurant menu. When these facilities did become available their design and floorplan was easily adaptable to other types of non USDA food processing operations or FDA inspected facilities . The facilities were well constructed with all of the water, sewer, employee welfare and electrical amenities already built into this type of formerly UDSA inspected refrigerated food processing building. Companies that process food generally found all of these amenities desirable whether or not their processes and or food processing operations required refrigeration with either freezer or cooler warehouse storage temperatures or refrigerated food processing areas.

Whenever a refrigerated UDSA inspected further processing facility or building becames available in any real estate market, whether it was a large or small building and was in good repair, and also there was also a ready and willing food processing company also in that industrial real estate market that was in need of a different location, these used refrigerated facilities with the superior choice over any new facility construction options. The predominant factors establishing that superior choice were immediate availability and purchase price.

Jim Cronin and Phil Pisciotta, real estate agents of Hawk Distribution Services, LLC www.hawkds.com have extensive real estate brokerage experiences with these types of facilities. Jim Cronin of St. Louis, Missouri can be contacted at 314-994-0577 or j.cronin@hawkds.com and Phil Pisciotta of Kansas City, Missouri can be contacted at p.pisciotta@hawkds.com  or 816-510-2060.

Tribute to Barney Bossard, a Respected Member of the Midwest Produce Industry.

A Tribute to Barney Fozzard, a respected member of the Midwest's produce industry.

Barney Fozzard is a respected member of the Midwest’s fruit and vegetable growing and repackaging industry with an excess of 50 years of management and financial positions in southern Illinois. Barney began his career in the produce industry in 1951 after his graduation from college with an accounting degree. He first produce industry position was the Office Manager for the Illinois Fruit Growers Exchange which is located in Carbondale, Illinois. Carbondale is in southwest Illinois near the Shawnee National Forest. The Illinois Fruit Growers Exchange specialized in locally grown fruits and vegetables and was best known for their apples and peaches. The soil and growing conditions are excellent for fruit trees in that part of Southern Illinois.

The Illinois Fruit Growers Exchange was a cooperative of 146 stockholder members. This cooperative provided its members a superior way to market and distribute their locally grown fruit and vegetables from their orchards. The Cooperative became so successful that it constructed and relocated into a brand-new facility in 1964. Barney Fozzard toured the United States for the cooperative to research the most advanced facilities at that time for warehousing and repackaging operations of the member’s produce. The new 50,000 square feet facility was then constructed on 12 acres at 7995 North Jamestown Road Cobden, Illinois 62920 which is in Union County and 11 miles from Carbondale, but closer to the local orchard industry. The produce repackaging storage facility included a state-of-the-art ammonia refrigeration mechanical system. It was necessary to very quickly remove huge amounts of temperature from the apples and peaches picked from the local orchards of the members of the Illinois Fruit Growers Exchange. The fruit and vegetables would be received at field temperature, quickly cooled to 32° through blast cooling then held at the facility in cooler warehouse space. The refrigeration system was capable of taking produce at ambient temperature of the mid-90° to 32° within 36 hours. The refrigerated warehouse area had 26 foot c Hawk eilings which was unusually high for a 1964 produce repackaging facility. The product was marketed nationally, repackaged and then shipped throughout the United States.

As agriculture in general shifted from the small family farm to larger scales of farming and produce growing operations, Barney orchestrated the sale of the Cooperative to its 4 major shareholders. Barney stayed on as the Comptroller and managed the business operations of the new company. Then in 1991, Heartland Harvest and Rose Farms purchased this cooperative. Rose Farms operated a 5,000 acre vegetable growing operation that specialized in red peppers, green peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes. Heartland Harvest and Rose Farms employed up to 350 employees in the farming operation and 175 employees in 2 shifts in the packaging and repackaging operations still located at the Cobden facility. Barney stayed on as the Controller of this company until Heartland Harvest closed its doors in 1996. Barney then stayed on as custodian of the property until it was sold to Rosemont Farms in 2005 and reestablished a packing operation for locally grown fruits and vegetables in the southern Illinois region.

Barney Fozzard’s 55 year career is perhaps one of the longest and most successful careers ever in the produce industry. Barney's thorough understanding of the Midwest produce growers and the repackaging industry is unrivaled. His honesty, integrity and efficiency and industry knowledge was appreciated and admired by throughout his distinguished career.

If you would like to contact Barney; please contact Jim Cronin, a real estate broker at Hawk Distribution Services, LLC http://www.hawkds.com/ at either 314-994-0577 or j.cronin@hawkds.com