A portfolio of eight switch and data center sites in the US are up for sale.
JLL is offering eight switch data center assets owned by the seller on a fee simple basis and leased to a telecommunications company on an absolute net basis.
The sites are located in eight cities across seven states, totaling 379,000 square feet (35,210 sqm) spread across 26 acres.
The facilities are located in Lexington, Kentucky; Texarkana and Sugar Land, Texas; Colorado Springs, Colorado; Dubuque, Iowa; Harrison, Arkansas; Hobbs, New Mexico; and Dalton, Georgia.
Seven of the assets are 100 percent leased to the tenant through 2034 and the 8th asset through 2031. The tenant has maintained occupancy in all assets since at least 2014. The properties generate a total rent of $5.7 million annually.
The unnamed tenant is described as a “major home Internet provider,” with online listings for each address suggesting it is likely Windstream.
“The properties are critical infrastructure to the tenant as the locations are interconnected transmission facilities that efficiently route telecommunication traffic across their network,” JLL said. “The Colorado Springs and Lexington assets serve as key data center locations for the tenant’s wholesale services, with the Lexington asset serving as the switch and data center hub for the tenant's east coast operations.”
Windstream was formed in 2006, when Alltel's local telephone service merged with Valor Communications Group out of part of GTE (now part of Verizon's) local telephone business in the Southwestern United States. Some of the sites on offer were previously Alltel or Valor facilities.
As well as dark fiber, Windstream Wholesale also offers colocation services. Windstream previously sold its data center business to TierPoint in 2015 for $575 million.
A vacant former Windstream data center was up for sale in Chicago, Illinois, earlier this year.