Rexford Industrial Realty in the last two weeks has picked up three Los Angeles-area properties for $44.25M, including two sites it plans to redevelop, publicly filed documents show.

The Sawtelle-based industrial real estate firm picked up 12118 Bloomfield Ave. in Santa Fe Springs on a 5.2-acre site for $16.65M and 19007 South Reyes Ave. in Rancho Dominguez on 4.5 acres for $16.35M, both with redevelopment in mind. Rexford also paid $11.25M for 256 East Alondra Blvd. in Gardena, a 2.8-acre outdoor industrial storage site.

The Santa Fe Springs property is the second in the city that Rexford has purchased in the last month. At the end of March, the company announced the $23.3M purchase of a seven-building property about 3 miles away from the Bloomfield site — 9900 to 10020 Pioneer Blvd., also in Santa Fe Springs. Rexford is planning to reposition the buildings, which it said were mostly vacant, making capital improvements to update the facilities, according to a statement about the purchase.

Rexford noted in a Form 10-Q filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that LA County’s industrial market had a strong Q1 2021, with average asking lease rates up both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter. Vacancy decreased, “bringing the market back to pre-pandemic vacancy levels,” Rexford said.

Direct vacancies in the Los Angeles industrial market decreased in the first quarter to 2.4%, according to a Q1 2021 report from Kidder Mathews. That same report projected that the market would see rent growth rise by 5% or 6% annually as demand continues to outpace supply, new construction is absorbed quickly and vacancies stay low.

Rexford was on a tear in 2020, acquiring more than $1B in commercial real estate in the year, BizJournals reported. Among those transactions was a roughly 464K SF portfolio in Vernon with six fully leased properties for which Rexford paid $93.8M — making it the largest transaction of the year in Vernon, Commercial Observer reported at the time.