The San Gabriel Valley land sale to an owner-user marks one of five Q1 dispositions as the REIT pivots away from speculative development to fund accretive share buybacks.
Rexford Industrial Realty has sold a 5.1-acre land site at 14005 Live Oak Avenue in Irwindale for $14.5 million, or $65 per land square foot, walking away from a project the company says no longer cleared its return hurdles. The vacant San Gabriel Valley parcel traded to an owner-user on February 6, 2026, according to Rexford’s Q1 2026 10-Q filing.
The Irwindale exit headlines a sharper strategic shift at the publicly traded REIT (NYSE: REXR), which has stopped acquiring property entirely and is now redeploying disposition proceeds into stock repurchases. By selling the site rather than developing it out, Rexford expects to preserve approximately $20 million in future capital spend that had been earmarked for the project, the company disclosed in a February release.
“At Mulberry Avenue in the Inland Empire West, we are foregoing a previously planned repositioning project that no longer meets our return requirements, and the property is now being offered both for sale and for lease as is,” Chief Operating Officer John Nahas said on the company’s April 24 earnings call, describing the broader pipeline review that produced the Irwindale exit and similar moves. The same logic, he indicated, applied across multiple sites the company has now removed from its near-term development queue.
The 14005 Live Oak transaction sits inside Los Angeles County’s San Gabriel Valley submarket, an infill industrial corridor that has held up better than the larger Inland Empire on vacancy but has not been immune to the broader rent reset working its way through Southern California. Direct vacancy in the broader Los Angeles industrial market edged up to 5.9 percent in Q1 2026, with direct average asking rents finishing the quarter at $1.39 per square foot NNN, an 8.6 percent year-over-year decline, according to Kidder Mathews’ Q1 2026 Los Angeles Industrial Market Report. CBRE’s Q1 2026 figures put Los Angeles vacancy at 5.4 percent with availability at 8.1 percent and asking rents at $1.21 NNN per square foot per month.
Owner-users have emerged as the most aggressive bidders in the current market, a dynamic Rexford management has openly leveraged. “Right now, in the market overall, we’re still seeing low transaction volume. And so it presents this opportunity for users to continue to be active. And so we’re capitalizing on that where it generates these low cap rates that allow us to accretively recycle capital,” Nahas told analysts on the earnings call.
The $65-per-land-square-foot pricing reflects the bifurcated nature of the current bid environment. Investors continue to underwrite cautiously on speculative land, but owner-users — many of them benefiting from accelerated depreciation on fixturization and equipment investments alongside the real estate — are willing to step up on a dollars-per-foot basis where the parcel fits their operating requirements.
For Rexford, the math behind the sale extends beyond the headline number. The $14.5 million in proceeds, combined with the $20 million in avoided capital spend, frees roughly $34.5 million in capital that the company can redeploy. During Q1, Rexford repurchased $200 million of its own shares at a weighted-average price of $36, bringing cumulative buybacks since mid-2025 to $450 million. The board authorized a fresh $500 million repurchase program in April.
“Given the dislocation between Rexford’s public market valuation and the intrinsic value of our platform, share repurchases remain a compelling driver of FFO and NAV per share accretion,” CEO Laura Clark said on the call.
Irwindale itself, tucked between the 605 and 210 freeways and dotted with mid-century industrial product, has historically traded on land value rather than building economics. The submarket’s defining constraint is the difficulty of building anything new in infill Los Angeles County, where regulatory friction, lot scarcity and rising construction costs have made ground-up development increasingly uneconomic at current rent levels.
That backdrop helps explain why Rexford was willing to part with the parcel rather than push the development forward. “Supply under construction remains near historic lows and the structural barriers to new supply that have emerged in recent years, including significantly increased regulatory restrictions have fundamentally altered the market’s ability to add supply,” Clark said. With construction starts dwindling and small-format infill product especially scarce — approximately 80 percent of existing inventory under 50,000 square feet was built more than 50 years ago, according to Rexford’s own market analysis — long-term fundamentals favor the owner-users now stepping in to absorb sites like Live Oak Avenue.
Rexford’s full-year 2026 disposition target stands at $400 million to $500 million, with $144 million closed year-to-date and another $170 million under contract or accepted offer.
