Unifi, Inc., the North Carolina-based maker of REPREVE recycled fiber, has agreed to sell two non-strategic real estate assets in Yadkin County, N.C., for approximately $60 million in gross proceeds, the company disclosed Monday in an 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The properties comprise roughly 120 acres of land and 500,000 square feet of warehouse space across two separate operating locations. The transaction is expected to close in the company’s second fiscal quarter, subject to customary closing conditions.
“This carve out of assets is expected to have minimal operational impact to our business and create no downtime in our daily processes,” said Eddie Ingle, Unifi’s chief executive officer.
Proceeds aimed at debt reduction
Unifi said the roughly $60 million in gross proceeds, before fees and expenses, will go toward reducing debt, optimizing its operating footprint and enhancing the company’s future financial performance and flexibility. The filing states the sale will “retire a substantial amount of debt,” though the company did not specify an exact reduction figure in the disclosure.
Unifi, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker UFI, is best known for REPREVE, its branded recycled polyester fiber used by apparel and textile manufacturers. The company has been based in Greensboro, N.C., for decades and operates manufacturing facilities across the state, making Yadkin County one of several North Carolina counties where it has held industrial real estate.
Yadkin County sits roughly 30 miles northwest of Winston-Salem in the heart of Unifi’s traditional North Carolina manufacturing base, an area long associated with the state’s textile industry. Unifi has operated fiber and yarn production and warehousing facilities across the region for decades, and the real estate being sold represents older or underutilized capacity rather than the company’s core, currently operating plants, according to the filing’s description of the assets as “non-strategic.”
Part of a broader industrial real estate churn in the Southeast
The sale adds Unifi to a list of manufacturers and investors reshuffling industrial holdings across the Southeast this year. Institutional buyers have been active on the acquisition side of that same market: TPG AG Real Estate and Redfearn Capital recently bought a $628 million Southeast industrial portfolio, underscoring continued investor appetite for warehouse and manufacturing space in the region even as individual corporate owners like Unifi look to monetize non-core real estate.
The filing does not name a buyer or disclose whether the sale followed a competitive marketing process. Unifi’s 8-K covers the transaction under items for entry into a material agreement and a related public disclosure, the standard SEC categories for announcing a definitive but not-yet-closed deal.
What it means
The $60 million gross proceeds figure and the property details come directly from Unifi’s SEC filing and are verified facts. The company’s characterization of “minimal operational impact” is management’s own assessment, not an independently verified operational outcome, and the filing leaves open exactly how much of the proceeds will go toward debt paydown versus other uses.
For a public manufacturer carrying debt, converting underused industrial real estate into cash is a straightforward way to strengthen a balance sheet without touching core production capacity. Whether the sale meaningfully changes Unifi’s financial profile will become clearer once the deal closes and the company reports how the proceeds were actually deployed.
