Gateway 14’s deal with The Range was named the 2023 Sale/Acquisition of the Year CoStar Impact Award winner, announced on the 31st March, 2023.
Home and garden retailer The Range entered into a £200 million forward funding arrangement for a build-for-purpose, 1.2-million-square-foot distribution warehouse at Gateway 14 in Stowmarket in the middle of last year, a major commitment that stood out for CoStar’s East of England Impact Awards.
The joint venture between Mid Suffolk District Council and the developer Jaynic will complete the turn-key project for The Range in autumn 2023. It will be The Range’s third major distribution facility in the UK.
The first part of the Gateway 14 development scheme, a 2.36-million-square-foot campus of warehouses with a business and technology focus. The complex lies within the Freeport East zone, an area of lower taxes and relaxed regulations designed to spur business development in the area and wider region.
The panel of judges included Walter Scott, Bidwells’ partner, logistics and industrial, who said: “It’s a transaction on a very large unit to kick-off a significant new industrial warehouse scheme in the region. The sale of such a large warehouse cements the reputation of the A14 corridor and the Eastern Region as a whole as a key distribution warehouse location within the UK market.”
Cambridge University’s professor of real estate finance, Colin Lizieri, said: “G14 has impact in that it creates jobs in a vulnerable market town, plus it has overcome the challenge of achieving a retail transaction in a difficult market. In a sense it’s the least glamorous of deals, but the one that probably has more local economic and social impact in the region.”