EPE's first East Coast facility is 79,000 square feet in Richmond.

 E.P.E. Takes New Class A Industrial Space

Richmond, Va. - EPE Packaging has opened its first East Coast location with 79,800 square feet of manufacturing and warehouse space in Richmond's River's Bend. EPE designs and manufactures custom foam packing materials contoured to fit high-technology electronics. Approximately 25,000 square feet of the space is being used for manufacturing, and the remainder is warehouse and distribution space.

EPE's parent company, EPE Industries, has been based in Tokyo for the last 26 years. The U.S. headquarters for EPE Packaging was opened in San Leandro, California, in 1991. "EPE" stands for expanded polyethylene, which, together with polypropylene, make up the foam EPE customizes for its client's packaging designs. Overall, the cartons offer ease of assembly and reduced labor costs; they are smaller and lighter, resulting in smaller shipping costs as well as reduced shipping damage claims.

EPE's client list reads like a who's who of high technology: Lucent Technologies, Sony, 3Com, Compaq, NEC, Ricoh, Toshiba, Epson, Sanyo, Panasonic, IBM and Xerox.

EPE Packaging chose to locate its first East Coast manufacturing site in Richmond, because its main client, Hewlett Packard, is 12 miles from River's Bend. HP has a 1.5-million-square-foot facility where it manufactures printers and related products.

The River's Bend space is brand new, first-generation, Class A space that was developed by Liberty Property Trust in 1998 on land purchased through Divaris Real Estate's Richmond office.

"Richmond is long overdue to become a distribution center on the East Coast," says Lynn Guest, office and industrial specialist with DRE. "The Fair Grounds that was built in the 1970s was the only bulk warehouse/light manufacturing center in the region and it is now considered Class B." Even though the Fair Grounds is huge, at over 2 million square feet, EPE was interested in River's Bend's pristine new space.

Divaris Real Estate represented EPE Packaging as an affiliate broker of CRESA, Irvine, California, a member of Commercial Real Estate Service Advisors, a national network of commercial real estate firms specializing in office tenant representation. Divaris Real Estate is the CRESA affiliate in central and southeastern Virginia.