By Robbie Whelan And Shayndi Raice 

Prologis Inc., a big owner of warehouses and retail-distribution centers, has agreed to buy industrial-property owner KTR Capital Partners for $5.9 billion, in one of the largest real-estate deals so far this year.

Prologis agreed late last week to buy closely held KTR, which owns 70 million square feet of real estate concentrated largely in California, New Jersey, Chicago, South Florida and Texas, people familiar with the matter said. As part of the deal, to be announced as early as Sunday, Prologis will assume about $750 million in debt, these people said.

Prologis, based in San Francisco, is one of the largest U.S. real-estate investment trusts, with a market value of more than $22 billion. The company owned 2,853 properties at the end of 2014, the bulk of them in North America, and with more than 600 in Europe and Asia. It also manages $29 billion in real-estate assets through joint ventures and a series of funds backed by institutional investors.

The company solidified its position in the market through a 2011 combination with AMB Property Corp. that was valued at more than $8 billion.

KTR was founded in 2004 by several top executives at Keystone Property Trust after the REIT was sold to Prologis's predecessor company and investment firm Eaton Vance Management.

KTR, based in New York, raised three funds, with total invested capital of about $2.5 billion, between 2006 and 2013. The funds buy and develop warehouses and business parks with office space and distribution centers for retailers, food-and-beverage companies and others. Many of KTR's assets are seen as attractive because they cater to the fast-growing e-commerce industry. Its warehouses are often situated near major ports.

In March, Prologis Chief Executive Hamid Moghadam said at an investor conference that the company was trying to simplify its fund business and focus on growth through the development of new properties and joint ventures. Since the AMB deal, Mr. Moghadam said, the company has reduced the number of funds it manages to 11 from 23 and closed or sold off underperforming investment vehicles.

"We've sold our non-strategic assets and we want to replace them in the U.S.," Mr. Moghadam said. "The development business is a great way of replacing" assets it is selling, he added.

About 10 million square feet owned by KTR is under development or not yet completely built.

After several quiet years, deal making in the real-estate sector has begun to pick up, driven by cheap credit and a wave of cash from large investors seeking to capitalize on rising prices for commercial property. Green Street Advisors, a Newport Beach, Calif., research firm, said in a January report that the volume of real-estate deals fell by 80% between 2007 and the end of 2014 compared with the previous seven years, and that conditions were ripe for transactions to pick up.

In December, private-equity giant Blackstone Group LP announced it would sell its industrial real-estate business, IndCor Properties Inc., to Singapore's sovereign-wealth fund for more than $8 billion. This month, General Electric Co. announced it was selling more than $20 billion in real-estate holdings to Blackstone and Wells Fargo & Co. Activist investors have also been pressuring a number of companies to sell themselves or spin off their real-estate assets into separate REITs. Companies including Hudson's Bay Co., Sears Holding Corp. and Pinnacle Entertainment Inc. have outlined plans for real-estate spinoffs in recent months. In April, health-care-property landlord Ventas Inc. announced it would spin off more than $5 billion in nursing facilities into a separate company.

Prologis has been negotiating its purchase of KTR for about three months, according to people familiar with the sales process. Other bidders who looked at the company as part of the process include Blackstone, the world's largest real-estate fund manager, and Canadian investment firm Brookfield Asset Management, according to the people.

Write to Robbie Whelan at robbie.whelan@wsj.com and Shayndi Raice at shayndi.raice@wsj.com

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