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A warehouse for a medical device manufacturer in New Brighton has sold for $15 million this week according to a certificate of real estate value.
The property was formerly owned by Donatelle Plastics, a company that specialized in building and manufacturing medical components and devices. Donatelle was acquired by DuPont, a Wilmington, Delaware, company that develops chemicals.
While how much DuPont paid for Donatelle’s business operations was not disclosed, the $15 million for the warehouse, located at 501 County Road E-2 Extension in New Brighton, was a cash deal.
According to Ramsey County tax records, the 2024 estimated market value of the warehouse is $9.7 million, an increase from the 2023 estimated market value of $7.9 million. The warehouse was built in 1998, and according to a Catylist listing it is over 150,000 square feet.
In a press release about the acquisition of Donatelle, the chemical giant said the Minnesota company brings aboard advanced technologies for building “injection molding, liquid silicone rubber processing, precision machining, device assembly and tool building.”
DuPont head of media relations Dan Turner said in an email statement that the Donatelle facility would operate business as usual and that no other property was part of the purchase of Donatelle. This marks the third site in the Twin Cities metro that is a part of the DuPont empire — Turner said Spectrum Plastics Group has a warehouse in Minneapolis and DuPont Water Solutions operates an Edina location.
In a DuPont report on its second quarter earnings, CEO Lori Koch said the purchase of Donatelle marks an expansion of its health care footprint.
“Earlier this week we announced the closing of the Donatelle acquisition which expands our health care offerings through enhanced expertise in medical device markets closely related to the Spectrum business we purchased last year,” Koch said.
The north central submarket, where the property is located, has a low vacancy rate of 1.9% overall, and even lower for manufacturing properties, which sits at 1.3%, according to a Colliers industrial market report for the second quarter of 2024. This is compared to a direct vacancy rate of 4.0% for the Twin Cities overall.
According to the Colliers report, the north central is likely to be on the receiving end of a good number of new deliveries in the coming years in a time when construction and development is starting to take a dip due to the interest rate environment and other increasing costs. There are 493,000 square feet under construction currently, the most of any Twin Cities submarket, 16% of which is preleased.
Low vacancy and decreasing deliveries are the recipe for rent growth, according to industrial brokers, though Hudson Brothen, executive director at Cushman & Wakefield, called the Twin Cities metro vacancy rate “unhealthily low.”
