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XPO CEO Mario Harik considers the 28 former Yellow Corp. truck terminals. which his company acquired in last year’s bankruptcy auction “the network’s crown jewels.”
![Headshot of Mario Harik, incoming CEO of XPO Logistics](https://www.truckingdive.com/imgproxy/SAcqw4kXJRyLCoQXcOWCIdfQ0-BlTK7S1sKoOPtUVN8/crop:2879:1627/background:0:0:0/g:nowe:0:168/rs:fill:0:860:0/bG9jYWw6Ly8vZGl2ZWltYWdlL1hQT19NYXJpb19IYXJpa19kU3IyS2JKLmpwZw.webp)
![Headshot of Mario Harik, incoming CEO of XPO Logistics](https://www.truckingdive.com/imgproxy/SAcqw4kXJRyLCoQXcOWCIdfQ0-BlTK7S1sKoOPtUVN8/crop:2879:1627/background:0:0:0/g:nowe:0:168/rs:fill:0:860:0/bG9jYWw6Ly8vZGl2ZWltYWdlL1hQT19NYXJpb19IYXJpa19kU3IyS2JKLmpwZw.webp)
XPO CEO Mario Harik
Courtesy of XPO
The Greenwich, Connecticut-based company prioritized the size of the properties and the scarcity of nearby terminals or land in its $870 million purchases.
“The 28 we got were essentially the highest priority we had on the network, but each one had a different reason,” Harrick told Trucking Dive in an interview last week.
XPO, Estes Express Lines, Saia and Knight-Swift Transportation Holdings each spent hundreds of millions of dollars adding the damaged competitor’s terminals to their networks. But not all LTL majors saw the same value: Old Dominion Freight Line, which initially bid $1.5 billion for a stalking horse, ended up pulling out of the auction.
In interviews and fourth-quarter earnings calls, several trucking company leaders discussed their strategies and some of the most beloved real estate acquisitions in the biggest bankruptcy in the industry’s history.
XPO adds key convenience, efficiency benefits
XPO paid about $300,000 per door at the more than 20 truck terminals it acquired from Yellow, according to Harik.
In the mock interview, he pulled up a map of Nashville and envisioned XPO’s new, larger terminal west of the city serving the Tennessee capital’s growing population — and better serving the carrier’s operation at the interstate shipping hub.
“The number one benefit that we’re going to have is actually an efficiency benefit,” Harrick said. “In this market, we don’t need to hire new people on day one. All we have to do is move our existing breakbulk business to this much larger facility in West Nashville.”
Harrick also advertises XPO’s terminal purchases in Columbus, Ohio. Carlisle, Pennsylvania; and Las Vegas as coveted items in the auction, which raised nearly $2 billion to pay off the Treasury Department and Yellow’s other creditors.
“They’re service centers that every LTL company places a lot of value on,” he said.
Estes invests along the Canadian border, elsewhere
Estes has strengthened its US-Canada cross-border presence with facilities in Detroit. Buffalo, New York; and Burlington, Vermont, as well as a lease in Tacoma, Washington, President and COO Webb Estes told Trucking Dive in an interview.
![Webb Estes, president and COO of Estes Express Lines](https://www.truckingdive.com/imgproxy/5egeIIm7IYqNEK7wU42uspzrbO-Hjyui8bL5kbRZChg/g:ce/rs:fill:0:860:0/bG9jYWw6Ly8vZGl2ZWltYWdlL1dlYmJfRXN0ZXNfMi5qcGc.webp)
![Webb Estes, president and COO of Estes Express Lines](https://www.truckingdive.com/imgproxy/5egeIIm7IYqNEK7wU42uspzrbO-Hjyui8bL5kbRZChg/g:ce/rs:fill:0:860:0/bG9jYWw6Ly8vZGl2ZWltYWdlL1dlYmJfRXN0ZXNfMi5qcGc.webp)
Webb Estes, president and COO of Estes Express Lines
Courtesy of Estes Express Lines
Among the $285 million it won bids, it spent more than $10 million per terminal in the five most expensive locations, Indianapolis. Olive Branch, Mississippi; Romulus, Michigan; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Boynton Beach, Florida.
“We bought a lot of the strategics we needed,” Estes said. “But we also tried to do it efficiently, from a cost perspective. I didn’t want to spend forever on it.”
Webb Estes, who has never been to Hawaii, joked in an interview that the terminal Estes acquired in Waipahu could be an opportunity to visit.
“Very excited for the opportunity to have boots on the ground there and feel like that’s going to differentiate us,” Estes said.
Saya sees a once-in-a-century opportunity
The roughly $250 million Saia spent on the Yellow Terminals will make up just a quarter of its billion-dollar capital budget for this year, said EVP and CFO Doug Col. earnings call.
“Saia will approach record levels of capital investment in 2024, but at no time in the company’s 100-year history have we had a similar opportunity,” CEO Fritz Holzgrefe told analysts.
The Johns Creek, Georgia-based carrier acquired 17 terminals and 11 leases in the auction, including sites in Laredo, Texas. Trenton, New Jersey; Cheyenne, Wyoming; and St. George, Utah.
Facility openings will be expanded throughout the year following necessary repairs, Holzgrefe said.
“Some of the facilities we’ve recently acquired … require some level of investment to bring them up to the standards we expect,” he said.
Knight-Swift uses the Yellow exit to create the nascent LTL
Knight-Swift took the opportunity to grow the network of its LTL operation, which began three years ago, with several batches of real estate acquisitions.
The Phoenix-based transportation behemoth bought 13 terminals, then a pair of leases in Washington and Montana, then another 10 leases from Yellow in the bankruptcy process.
In its first batch of bids, the trucking giant paid an average of less than $4 million per terminal to acquire properties in nine states.
“Filling a hyper-regional network in the short term and building a national network in the long term will allow us to participate in more freight traffic and allow us to find opportunities to further support our existing LTL truckload customers.” said CEO and President David Jackson on an earnings call.
ArcBest stands for “things that matter most”
While it didn’t bid as much as some of its competitors, ArcBest viewed Yellow’s real estate auction as a “once in a lifetime kind of deal,” chairman, president and CEO Judy McReynolds said in an interview with Trucking Dive.
![Judy McReynolds, ArcBest CEO](https://www.truckingdive.com/imgproxy/QKauVySXUBFKozBiBVchKjFbHN6mO-73dKAjJ_FJzPM/g:ce/rs:fill:0:860:0/bG9jYWw6Ly8vZGl2ZWltYWdlL0p1ZHlNY1JleW5vbGRzXzM1MC5qcGc.webp)
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Judy McReynolds, chairman, president and CEO of ArcBest;
Courtesy of ArcBest
Parent company ABF Freight spent $30 million to buy property in Des Moines, Iowa. Columbus, Ohio; and Springdale, Arkansas. He obtained a lease in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania for 7.6 million dollars.
“You have to make sure you’re positioning yourself well for the things that matter most,” McReynolds said.
ArcBest’s auction strategy was to add properties to meet demand “in a way that makes sense,” he said.
“These are long-term decisions, and so you want them to be good long-term decisions,” McReynolds said. “It’s always exciting to have more options.”
Old Dominion reports the cost of exiting the auction
Rising valuations prompted the Thomasville, North Carolina-based LTL leader to exit, Old Dominion EVP and CFO Adam Satterfield said during earnings call.
“We felt that, given the cost, that — you can see now in hindsight that it was better for us to just keep control,” Satterfield said.
“Our network is in a great place as it is, but we still have the ability to control when we add to the network in time, where we decide to add the facilities and exactly how we want to build them,” he added. .