A startup is attempting to create something that U.S. real-estate executives say doesn’t exist in their industry today: a public company that owns only one property.
The prospective property is a 146,000-square-foot Bay Area warehouse leased to Amazon.com LLC. The startup, ROX Financial LP, aims to use an initial public offering to create a real-estate investment trust that will acquire the Amazon facility. It then hopes to grow and own a collection of warehouses to serve the Seattle-based online giant, according to a June securities filing.
ROX Financial has applied to list the shares on the New York Stock Exchange’s Arca platform, an all-electronic exchange for exchange-traded funds and securities, public filings show.
It is offering 8,250,000 shares at $10 a share. That would value the startup at a tiny fraction of the $94 billion market capitalization of Prologis Inc., the largest industrial property REIT with the biggest portfolio of warehouses leased by Amazon.
ROX Financial officials declined to comment. But the proposed ticker symbol of AMZL was a nod to the Amazon strategy, said a person familiar with the company.