Tesla-leased East Side facility swaps owners

An East Side warehouse that’s occupied by Tesla Inc. as part of the supply chain for its plant near Austin has changed hands.

Mohr Capital, a Dallas-based real estate investment firm, said it acquired the 440,000-squarefoot building from Becknell Industrial. The price was not disclosed.

The building, known as Foster II, was built in 2022.

“We continue to add to our industrial portfolio by acquiring best-in-class assets nationwide,” Rodrigo Godoi, managing director of investments for Mohr Capital, said in a statement Wednesday. “This was a great opportunity to acquire a brand-new mission-critical industrial facility below replacement cost that is one hundred percent leased to a great tenant.”

Tesla has been growing its presence across the state as the company ramps up efforts to produce and sell more electric vehicles.

It moved its headquarters to the Austin area from Palo Alto, Calif., in 2021. It opened its 10million-square-foot Gigafactory Texas last year and is planning to spend about $775 million to expand the factory, according to filings with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation. Construction is slated to start at the end of the month on a cathode facility, cell test lab, die shop, drive unit and an undisclosed 693,093-square-foot facility dubbed Cell 1 at the plant.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has also been building new facilities around Texas for his tunneling firm The Boring Company and rocket maker Spacex in Central and South Texas.

About two weeks ago, Tesla executives told investors the company had broken ground on a proposed lithium refinery near Corpus Christi in South Texas, with plans to produce battery-grade chemicals by year’s end for use in electric vehicles.

Musk also confirmed Tesla would build a plant in northern Mexico to manufacture an electric vehicle that would sell for less than any of its other models. The Mexican factory will reportedly be twice the size of Tesla’s plant in Texas.

Tesla has been leasing the Lancer Boulevard building since last year.

“They were also looking at Houston and Austin … but we had the space on the ground,” Michael Kent, executive vice president at Stream Realty Partners, said in an interview last year.

Mohr Capital described the building’s location as “one of the best industrial submarkets of San Antonio, where rents have continued to grow past $6 per square foot.”

Tesla also operates service centers near San Antonio International Airport and the Dominion.