CRG has hired the leadership team responsible for acquisitions at Duke Realty, recently acquired by Prologis for $26 billion. Building on CRG’s success developing over $1 billion of new industrial projects annually and strong track record with its first two logistics funds, USLF I and II, CRG plans to expand its real estate strategy to include the acquisition of existing industrial assets. The recently hired team was instrumental in building Duke’s industrial portfolio throughout the U.S. and will leverage CRG’s existing national platform to acquire critical supply-chain assets located in core port-of-entry markets and high-density population centers.
The new hires include Mark Crawford, former senior vice president and head of acquisitions at Duke, who joins CRG as chief investment officer; Joe Hawkins, former senior vice president, legal and deputy general counsel at Duke, who will serve as a senior vice president of portfolio management for CRG’s investment management platform; and Isaac Lau, former vice president of acquisitions at Duke, who will serve as vice president of acquisitions for CRG’s Western Region. Crawford and Hawkins will split their time between CRG’s new Indianapolis office and its Chicago headquarters, while Lau will join the firm’s SoCal office.
At Duke, where Crawford had worked for the last 16 years, he was responsible for executing the firm’s national acquisitions strategy, which transformed the publicly traded REIT from a diversified Midwestern firm into a national pure-play industrial REIT with a leading tier one market presence. During his tenure, Crawford also directly led Duke’s largest-scale acquisition in the firm’s history, along with its largest regional acquisitions in Northern New Jersey, Miami, Seattle, and Southern California. At the close of the merger, the total portfolio comprised 160 million square feet of projects across 19 major logistics markets.
At Duke since 2011, Hawkins played a significant part in all major transactions, which repositioned Duke into the industrial REIT it became. Hawkins was also instrumental in growing the company’s West Coast portfolio from less than 5 million square feet in 2016 to nearly 30 million square feet at the time of close after executing approximately 150 acquisition and development transactions.
Lau joined Crawford’s acquisition and development team over a year ago after an extensive search for an experienced acquisitions professional to lead the REIT’s investment activities on the West Coast. Throughout his career in real estate investments and investment banking, he has closed more than $1 billion of total transaction volume. At Duke, Lau successfully sourced and executed $420 million of acquisitions representing over 1.2 million rentable square feet of logistics assets in high-growth industrial markets across the country.
CRG will continue to leverage the strength of its nationally recognized industrial brand, The Cubes, to attract Fortune 500 companies from the distribution, logistics, e-commerce, manufacturing, food and beverage, cold storage, aerospace, aviation, pharmaceutical, and laboratory sectors. The firm’s market-leading building specifications and unmatched locations are carefully selected with consumer-centric supply chain strategies, offering superior access to logistics networks and robust and qualified labor.
CRG’s vertically integrated platform drives deal flow and investment opportunities across the United States. Over the past five years, the firm has completed over 60 industrial, multifamily and office developments representing over $5 billion of transaction volume. The company maintains an impeccable track record of outperforming target returns and brings deep operational and financial knowledge that maximizes value.
