Amazon Expands at Valencia & Kolb in Tucson with 51-acre Delivery Station Site

TUCSON, ARIZONA – An affiliate of Amazon, Amazon.com Services, purchased 51 acres across from its current Fulfillment Center at 6701 South Kolb for $7.5 million ($146,000 per acre). A portion of Block 3 in Century Park, the property will be used for construction of an approximate 100,000+ square-foot Delivery Station.

Amazon bought its current site in 2018 for its 1.2 million-square-foot building at 6701 S Kolb Road also in Century Park, with 63 loading docks, nearly 400 transport trailer parking spaces, along with 2,500 standard parking spaces, on the site. Amazon requested this location be annexed into the City of Tucson. Amazon’s fulfillment center brought 1,500 full-time jobs.

Amazon has multiple types of logistics facilities: fulfillment centers, sortation centers, delivery stations and other specialized locations, such as air hubs. Each of these locations, for the most part, functions in a specific step in the company’s supply chain.

Amazon Delivery stations are dwarfed by the size of their fulfillment centers. The average size of a delivery station is 123,292-square-feet, according to Amazon.

These Delivery stations are used to prepare customer orders for last-mile delivery service to customers. Amazon delivery providers then enable fast, everyday shipping to customers.

The explosion in locations for Amazon’s smallest logistics asset has happened fairly quickly. Amazon had 159 locations at the end of 2019 and 337 at the end of 2020.

Fulfillment centers are designed to fill orders, they’re not designed to optimize transportation in any way.

This is where delivery stations help Amazon. Trucks leave fulfillment centers with trailers full of unorganized parcels. The parcels are organized for transport — grouped by delivery location — at sortation centers and later the delivery stations.

It’s a process similar to what happens at other companies, like UPS or FedEx, and highlights the company’s continued trend to insource its logistics network.

Packages are loaded onto conveyor belts at delivery stations where they are then separated by the ZIP code for delivery. These parcels are then put on a pallet, wrapped, and loaded onto another truck.

This will be Amazon’s third delivery station in metro Tucson.

Steve Cohen with Cushman & Wakefield | Picor negotiated the transaction for Amazon and the seller, Valencia Kolb Properties of Tucson (Michael Farley, manager).

For more information, Cohen should be reached at 520.546.2750.

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