Two New Jersey Industrial Yards Found for Acquisition
VP of Acquisitions, New York-based real estate credit and investment platform with an industrial outdoor storage arm · Central and northern New Jersey, then the Carolinas · August 12, 2026
What they knew
A New York real estate investment firm runs a three-person team that buys outdoor storage yards. It started in New Jersey and is now expanding into the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. Brokers bring in half of its deals. The other half comes from cold outreach, and that outreach lives or dies on one list: a scraped property export, offshore researchers who trace each LLC back to a person, and an outsourced call center working a power dialer and text campaigns. When the list is good, the business works. But skip-trace hit rates had been falling, and every new county meant building the list again from nothing.
What they asked
Show me every industrial-only parcel in this county where outdoor storage or parking is permitted as a primary or accessory use, with two or more usable acres and building coverage under 60 percent, and skip the institutional owners.
What MAIA did
Confirmed the zoning county by county
Where a county's records carried only use codes, MAIA read the municipal zoning to decide whether outdoor storage was a primary or accessory use, and explained why adjacent parcels were in or out.
Cut to usable acres and modest coverage
Parcel size and building footprints set the two-acre floor and the 60 percent coverage ceiling, and airport, port, and intermodal proximity ranked what remained.
Resolved owners for the text campaign
Corporate filings pierced the LLC past the registered agent to a mom-and-pop or operating owner, and mobile numbers and mailing addresses were exported in the columns the dialer and the texting platform need.
What came back
- 20,000 texts sent off MAIA's owner list across New Jersey's industrial counties, with 81 percent delivered and about 900 owners texting back
- About 1,100 parcels in Middlesex County matched the buy box on the first run, and the same prompt rerun county by county built a 2,500-owner list across ten counties
- 140 owner conversations, 11 yards in underwriting, and 2 under letter of intent from the first three campaigns
What they did next
Replies land with the virtual assistant, who labels each one, and the owners who answer move to the callers with the parcel, the zoning call, and the usable acres attached. One prompt holds the buy box, so opening the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida is a matter of rerunning it county by county. What the VP is building on top is a distress score from clerk-of-court and tax records, so the next campaign opens with the owners most likely to move.
Twenty thousand texts off one list. Nine hundred replies, a hundred and forty real conversations, two yards under LOI. My skip-trace vendor never got me a hit rate like that.
