Gillis Gilkerson has sold two warehouses in Seaford, including the Amazon warehouse, for $22.5 million. | PHOTO COURTESY OF NAI COASTAL
SEAFORD — The first Amazon warehouse in Sussex County has been sold, marking it the second Amazon facility in the First State to be sold in the past month, and the fourth sold in the past year.
Gillis Gilkerson sold the Amazon warehouse at 1700 Dulaney St. and a second warehouse at 200 Allen St. for $22.5 million to MIB Seaford TIC I and II LLC as part of an investment portfolio on Nov. 16.
Combined, the buildings have a floorspace of 300,0000 square feet in an industrial park with buildings left of the DuPont nylon plant that once dominated Seaford’s economy. Other tenants of the site include the state Department of Elections, Invista, Dunn’s Floor Coverings and Johnny Janosik World of Furniture.
NAI Coastal, the commercial real estate arm of Gillis Gilkerson that brokered the deal, identified the buyer only as “an investor headquartered in New Jersey.” Public mortgage records show the owners are Sheldon Blumfeld of New Jersey and Sidney Bornstein of Brooklyn, N.Y.
“This was an off-market deal, and it almost started as a long shot,” NAI Coastal Principal Chris Davis told the Delaware Business Times. “We were working with this buyer on other prospects, and it was a conversation that started in the summer that evolved from there.”
Amazon signed a lease in March 2021 at 1700 Dulaney St. to use the 104,000-square-foot warehouse as a last-mile delivery center. As the only Amazon facility in Sussex, orders were sorted and shipped via contract driver fleets within a 45-mile radius. The center targets customers from Milford to Salisbury, Md., as well as Long Neck to Denton, Md.
The Seaford warehouse, known internally to Amazon as WDE1, can process up to 8,000 packages a day.
Earlier this week, the Delaware Business Times reported that Stoltz Real Estate Partners sold a 1.3 million-square-foot Amazon facility in Bear for $246 million as part of an investment portfolio. Earlier this year, Macquarie Asset Management Real Estate, based in Sydney, acquired Amazon’s Boxwood facility for $392 million while the Middletown fulfillment center was sold for $118 million to Machine Investment Group.
Sussex County has been identified as a prime spot for warehouse and industrial building needs, and the market trends are still leaning that way, Davis said. While NAI Coastal takes a long-range view of the Mid-Atlantic region, the firm does roughly half its business in Sussex County.
“As far on the commercial side, this area has a huge need for industrial warehouse space for companies moving into logistics,” Davis added. “Sussex County has a very strong market in industrial space, mostly it’s a lack of inventory is the struggle.”
Christian Phillips, an advisor of NAI Coastal, added that many clients and prospective buyers are attracted to Sussex County for the same reasons why Delaware itself is attractive: the low cost of living and its central location on the East Coast.
“Sussex is pretty central, as far as it comes to logistics. You go north through the Route 1 all the way to New Jersey, you can go as far as the Bay Bridge Tunnel and you can go to the U.S. Route 50 to D.C,” Phillips said.
“Southern Delaware and the Eastern Shore [of Maryland] have the availability for these footprint for companies that some metropolitan areas just don’t have,” he added. “You can’t just reproduce land that doesn’t exist.”
