ModCloth’s warehouse space in Fairywood marketed for lease
A Conshohocken real estate company is marketing for lease 284,045 square feet of warehouse space now used by online vintagestyle clothing retailer ModCloth in the city’s Fairywood section.
Taylor Young, principal of the Maguire Hayden Real Estate Company, said Tuesday the firm put the space in the Chartiers Valley Industrial Park up for lease in the event ModCloth decides not to stay.
“It’s our fiduciary responsibility to market the space,” he said.
Should ModCloth not renew, it could open the door for Amazon to gobble up more space in the Pittsburgh region, where it has been on a building and leasing spree of late.
The online shopping juggernaut currently leases about 300,000 square feet in the same warehouse, where it operates a sortation facility that employs more than 500 people.
Amazon recently renewed its lease for its side of the warehouse, Mr. Young said.
“We’re going to explore every opportunity that makes sense for us and our investors,” he stressed.
Mr. Young added that Maguire Hayden is in “constant communication” with the online retailer as a tenant in the warehouse.
An Amazon spokesman could not be reached for comment.
The lease for the ModCloth space expires in the fourth quarter of 2022.
It is actually held by Walmart, which in an all-cash deal bought the Pittsburgh-founded clothing retailer in 2017 through its e-commerce company, Jet.com.
Two years later, Go Global Retail, a brand investment firm, acquired the assets of ModCloth from Walmart.
At the time, Go Global stated that ModCloth would continue to use its existing operational setup and that it would invest in the retailer’s digital capabilities, including artificial intelligence and predictive analytics.
Since the Go Global acquisition, Walmart has been subleasing the Fairywood warehouse space to ModCloth.
Last year, Retail Dive reported that ModCloth would remain headquartered in Los Angeles and that its fulfillment center would stay in Pittsburgh.
A Go Global spokesman did not have an immediate answer regarding the warehouse space. ModCloth could not be reached for a comment.
Should ModCloth not renew, Maguire Hayden also would explore the potential for Walmart itself taking the space.
“We’re just going to go ahead
and explore every opportunity and see what happens,” Mr. Young said.
He noted that he is confident the company will be able to find someone to take the square footage.
In addition to 215,670 square feet of warehouse floor space, the fulfillment center offers 42,321 square feet of office as well as a recently updated locker room, shower area, and large cafeteria.
It also is close to Interstate 79 and the Parkway West and fives miles from Downtown.
“We obviously have a fantastic piece of industrial space, an infill space second to none,” he said.
Amazon appears to be the most logical candidate. In addition to having space in the same warehouse, it has been expanding its reach in the Pittsburgh area.
It is planning another sortation center totaling more than 270,000 square feet in Findlay. That’s in addition to the 1- millionsquare-foot distribution center it opened in the same township last fall.
It also has distribution centers in the works in
Lawrenceville, North Versailles, and possibly Churchill. The Lawrenceville center, in a former Sears Outlet, and the North Versailles one, at the former Eastland Mall and shopping center, would be lastmile facilities.
Amazon also operates a warehouse in Aleppo and has a tech hub at SouthSide Works on the South Side that involves work on its Alexa voice technology, machine translation, and speech science.