Funds managed by Loci Fund II GP, LLC, an affiliate of private real estate fund manager Loci Capital Group, LLC, have formed a joint venture with RealtyLink Development to develop a 174,000 square-foot build-to-suit industrial building for a “leading” US homebuilder. The site is 39 acres in Haines City, Florida.

The joint venture and land transaction took place in April 2024, with the project expected to be completed and delivered in the third quarter of 2025.

“This checks all the boxes for Loci’s investment criteria, and we continue to have conviction in the tailwinds supporting industrial development in Central Florida, and the broader Southeast,” said Dave Workman, Loci Capital head of industrial development.

The Tampa-based firm identified the project’s “credit tenant, the simplicity of construction, the strength of its joint venture partner, and the attractive development spread for a pre-leased industrial project” as significant reasons for pursuing the investment alongside RealtyLink.

“The disruption in the capital markets has created an outsized opportunity in the pre-leased industrial space,” Casey Wilson, Loci Capital’s head of investor relations, told Connect Money. “We’ve worked with RealtyLink for the last decade, but our cost of capital is almost always too high for them. Now we can achieve opportunistic returns on build-to-suit deals for investment grade tenants.”

“Everyone likes to talk about distress through the lens of scraping assets off the bottom of the barrel. We’d like to think about it in terms of achieving outsized returns on low risk deals and that’s been the common theme across all our investments in Fund II,” added Wilson.

The firm has invested more than $250 million of equity in over $1 billion of real estate across its target markets, including the multifamily, hospitality, office, vacation rental, student housing, and medical office sectors, since its inception in 2019.

RealtyLink is a real estate development company that specializes in retail, industrial, restaurant, single and multifamily, self-storage, senior living, entertainment, and mixed-use properties.