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CHICAGO's biggest land developer, CenterPoint Properties, is beating the drum to attract mostly west coast containers through America's largest inland port, the US$3 billion CenterPoint Intermodal Centre at Joliet 40 miles southwest of Chicago.
CenterPoint, owned by the California Public Employees Retirement System (CALPERS), the largest pension fund in North America, it has already developed nine million square feet of industrial facilities within the Joliet complex over the last six years.
With two Class I railways - the Union Pacific and the BNSF - serving the 6,000 acre site with its sprawling container yards, warehouses and 25 miles of shunting tracks, the facility aims to become the leading distribution hub of MidAmerica with its easy access to the north-south I-55 and the east-west I-80 expressways.
"We always go into these ventures in partnership with a Class I railroad and in this case we have two of them. These are the west coast railroads, so the almost all of the volume is coming from the west coast," CenterPoint Intermodal Centre vice president Jared Zerbe.
He said the facility has direct access to the BNSF Logistics Park in Chicago as well as to Union Pacific's Joliet Intermodal Terminal.
The logistics park lies on both sides of a US Army Training Centre, once known as the Joliet Arsenal where ordnance was made and warehoused between 1939 and the early '90s.
The US$3 billion investment at full build out breaks down into two segments. On the southern side of the army camp is the BNSF base, previously called CenterPoint Intermodal Center Elwood, which will become a US$1 billion CenterPoint investment when fully built. North of the camp is the Union Pacific base, called "UP Global 4", and is expected to be a $2 billion CenterPoint investment at full build out.
While some clients are in place - Wal-Mart being the biggest - there remains much space available, and Mr Zerbe sees ocean carriers setting up operations there to marshal and turn around containers, and having logistics providers rent space to run consolidation and deconsolidation operations for distribution throughout the central United States.
Other tenants include Georgia Pacific, Bissell Homecare, Cypress Medical Products, Clearwater Paper, Partners Warehouse, DSC Logistics, NFI, JB Hunt, Schneider Logistics, Maersk Distribution Services, Bridge Terminal Transport.
CenterPoint, said Mr Jared, focuses on the development, ownership and intensive management of industrial real estate and related road, rail and port infrastructure.
Which means that while it is in real estate, the company is looking for opportunities to enlarge its share of the value chain, said Mr Zerbe, even seeing it running transport units of its own in the long-term.
For example, CenterPoint is bidding to run Virginia Ports container operations now that the authority is considering privatising operations. "We are one of three bidders on this project with the other two bidders being SSA/Goldman Sachs and Carlyle. The Virginia state government is examining the bids and the overall privatisation idea, but has not yet decided they will definitely privatise," he said.
CenterPoint terminals already include the $350 million CenterPoint Intermodal Centre (CPIC) in Suffolk, Virginia; the $300 million CPIC in Kansas City, Missouri; the $150 million CPIC in Savannah, Georgia; the $250 million CPIC in Manteca, California; the $300 million CPIC in Houston, Texas; the $100 million CPIC in Dallas, Texas; the $100 Ford Chicago Manufacturing Campus; the $500 million CPIC in Rochelle, Illinois and the $500 million CPIC in Crete, Illinois.
Source: SchedNet
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