Cold Storage Warehouse for Lease Or Rent - DFW Metro

Outside of the Metroplex, Northeast Texas is a predominantly agricultural area, where ranches and large farms predominate. A few dozen miles to the north is the state of Oklahoma, which, among other things, is also noted for its agricultural sector. The city of Fort Worth has an industry dedicated to the processing of grains, legumes and animals. It is no surprise, therefore, that many of the cold storage warehouses are located west of I-35.

In Fort Worth, Arlington, and Dallas, there has historically been plenty of cold storage industrial properties to choose from for purchase or lease. For various reasons, the pandemic has made these properties more difficult to find, but they are still out there for those who know how to look.

There are a wide range of uses for refrigerated space in warehouses. This includes things like Food Preparation and Storage at various stages of the value chain, vaccines and other drugs, plants, and, interestingly, more obscure items like document and art. For completeness, this can also include display of articles at temperature, but this is more likely at the retail level.

There are many complications with regard to Cold Storage. It tends to be expensive in terms of building, operating and maintaining. Your Cold Storage space is often built of necessity much like a building within a building because of the rigorous requirements. It must be sealed and extensively insulated. You must have ingress and egress - probably for humans and product from inside the building, and then if you are a volume operation you will likely need access through a dock directly connecting your cold storage space in warehouse with your cold storage transportation. All of these doors must be insulated and sealed as well. The space must be refrigerated throughout with temperatures carefully regulated. IF you need to store foods that require different temperatures, then you must create separators and regulate temperature differently for each area. If you are concerned about cross contamination between food types - like, say, you are doing some food processing in your cold space or for some other reason - then you must be able to certify what has and is being done in the area you are using and how it has been cared for. You'll probably need to be able to provide proof that what you've stored has been maintained at specified temperatures. These are some of the many complications...

First principles - building out and maintaining Cold Storage capability can be an expensive proposition. For this reason at a minimum, unused Cold Storage space tends to be scarce.

• Sometimes you will find facilities - often large - that have been vacated and are available to buy or lease. Figuring out if this type of facility is usable can be an undertaking. You will need to assess a wide range of issues - refrigeration methods, insulation quality and status, temperature ranges and divisibility, etc., etc.. You likely won't know exactly why the prior occupant decided to move out, so, of course, take care.
• If you have the scale, you will probably want to at least consider acquiring land and building. Of course, this requires more capital investment, so it needs to fit within the financial strategy of your company. This method should be expected to be better for your company from a COGS perspective, but it's possible you'll pay a price in flexibility over the long term. Build your own is not a decision to be taken lightly.
• Another is to find someone who's built it for themselve and determine whether or not they have space they aren't using and lease some space from them.
• Another is to find Cold Storage equipped space already built that is for sale or lease and have your Broker help you lease or buy the space.
• In the area of lease, there are people who build buildings to sub-divide the space and lease portions of the space to tenants. If this includes cold storage space, this could be your answer.
• There are also 3rd Party Logistics providers that provide and/or specialize in cold storage and will sell you cold storage as a part of a logistics package.

There are likely other options, and any of these may be an option for you.

If you expect to lease cold storage space, divisibility of that space can be quite challenging depending upon your requirements. Simply equipping a stand-alone facility for a single occupant with a range of refrigeration requirements isn't a picnic either. Available cold storage space must be divided up to provide potential tenants with what they need in terms of space and temperature. If the Tenant's requirements are complicated, this can raise the expense levels significantly. Chances are good that the landlord will be asking you to commit to a longer-term lease or pony up some of the capital expense up front to accommodate your needs - or both.

It can be possible to retrofit cold storage into an existing facility - although it might not be "pretty."

If you simply require non-freezing refrigerated space, then you can often just build an enclosure within the subject building and equip that enclosure properly. You need to determine whether or not you need the refrigeration to include some or all of your dock area.

Freezing space is a different matter altogether. Retrofitting a large freezer space within an existing building will likely require demo-ing that portion of your foundation and re-installing foundation to a new specification. At that point, you would then build a chamber similar to the more simple refrigerated space above - except with more stringent requirements. In this case, frost is not your friend.

You and/or your potential landlord will need to hire a refrigeration specialist to help everyone get what they need.

When a client asks us to help them search for a property to meet their needs for a Cold Storage Warehouse for Lease Or Rent in DFW, we go to the best listing services and to our fellow Commercial Real Estate brokers to pull together all the information available for properties meeting the stated client requirements. We validate the information to be provided - likely by talking directly with the selling or leasing brokers - and then help our clients go through this information to help them select the best fit properties, from which the client would select properties they wish to tour. We are posting an abbreviated version of a search we've either performed for another client, or one we've performed particularly for this article. We call the information provided in this article a "Survey," and we'd love to turn this survey into a full set of search results based upon your requirements! If you don't see a survey in the next section, it just means we haven't gotten around to it yet. If you need this type of property, please do let us know and we'll contact you to get started. The search we perform for you will include most or all categories you see here, plus information about pricing, other expenses, availability, and anything we can find regarding other requirements you provide for your use case. We would provide all of this, along with any available flyers, photos, and detailed information regarding each property.

This standard brokerage service is provided at no cost to you as it is ordinarily included in the transaction and paid for by the seller or landlord.

The market for Commercial Real Estate is very dynamic, and information regarding an available property can change from day-to-day, hour-to-hour, and even minute-to-minute. When you provide us with your requirements for a given property type, we perform a new search, validate all of the information, and provide you with the most reliable information we are able. The information we obtain for you is obtained from what we believe to be reliable sources. The statements and representations made are from these sources and not the statements and representations of the broker putting together your requested search.

Mike Pirzadeh is the exclusive Affiliate Broker for Warehouse Finder in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metro area. To make contact with us, please use our chat widget to the bottom right of your screen, call the number at the top right of your screen, or got to our form page to send us your contact information and a summary of your requirement. For more information about our Dallas-Fort Worth Area Affiliate, and more about what we do for you, please visit our Dallas-Fort Worth Metro Home Page.

If you like what you see here and you have a Cold Storage Warehouse for Lease Or Rent in DFW, or any other property or space you want to put on the market, please contact us and we'll provide you with a no-obligation listing consultation. To make contact with us, please use our chat widget to the bottom right of your screen, call the number at the top right of your screen, or use our listing information form to send us your contact information and a summary of your property.

What we do here at Warehouse Finder is identify and manage Broker/Affiliates in Metro areas as they work to help valued clients get the property or space that they need. We aim to be the best at what we do. If you have a requirement you can't service - most likely for a Metro area you don't serve - please contact us using our chat widget at the bottom right of your screen, call the number at the top right of your screen, or use our Broker Requirement form to send us your contact information and a summary of the requirement you would like us to address for your valued client. We will reach out to you as soon as practical to discuss the requirement and terms for proceeding.