Longtime South Portland industrial building changes hands
Courtesy / NAI The Dunham Group
Luke Morong bought a light-industrial building at 53 Wallace Ave. in South Portland as a long-term hold.
A 35,705-square-foot light-industrial building on 2.06 acres, at 53 Wallace Ave. in South Portland has changed owners, offering new possibilities after nearly two decades as a woodworking business.
Wallace 53 LLC bought the property from Wallace Realty LLC for $2.05 million. TC Haffenreffer represented the buyer and Tom Dunham and Greg Hastings represented the seller; the three brokers are with NAI The Dunham Group. The transaction closed Dec. 19.
Haffenreffer said the buyer is in the process of negotiating a lease with a potential tenant.
Pond Cove Millwork, an architectural woodworking firm, occupied the building for nearly two decades before moving to 22 Mill Brook Road in Saco in 2018.
Wallace 53 LLC is owned by Luke Morong, who founded commercial real estate investment and development company Shoreline Development Group.
“We’ve been in business five years,” Morong said. “We started with multi-family properties. But in the past two years, we’ve been pursuing industrial properties.”
Morong said he focuses on properties within a 30-mile radius of Portland.
Attractive pricing
Morong said the property has numerous advantages. It’s large enough to be subdivided down to 10,000 square feet for multiple tenants. The steel frame with metal siding has ceiling heights of 18 feet to 20 feet, heavy electrical service, four loading docks and two drive-in overhead doors. It’s about a mile from the Maine Turnpike and Interstate 295.
The building, which dates to 1978, is considered old for industrial space. But Morong said he liked the price.
“We like to buy in the $50 to $60 per square foot price range, and this fell within that,” he said. “We felt actually it was a bit discounted compared with other industrial sales we’ve looked at recently.”
The pricing was particularly attractive given the cost of new construction, he said.
“Building new, you’re looking at $100 to $120 per square foot,” he said.
It's set up with 3,000 square feet of office space on two floors and 32,705 square feet of manufacturing space.
The plan is to do some do some improvements, like adding a curb cut so it’s easier for an 18-wheelers to maneuver to the loading dock, upgrades and enlargement of the loading doors, and modernized systems. He said he expects the additional investment to be between $50,000 and $100,000.
Dunham, handling the lease listing, says in its marketing brochure the building is “recreational marijuana and caregiver friendly.”
This is Shoreline Development’s seventh industrial property acquisition, Morong said.
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