Market Reports

Still going strong after two years since the onslaught of COVID-19, Orlando’s industrial market has seen a steady increase of robust leasing activity and development, with no signs of stopping. The growth is attributable to record-low vacancy, emerging construction and increasing demand from existing tenants expanding their businesses and new tenants in the market. Economic conditions affecting the market are similar to last year, as labor shortages and supply chain issues remain. However, the industrial sector overall has not been adversely affected. Orlando continues to be the place for existing business advancement and new business development. The city’s population growth outpaces that of any other city in Florida due to its central location, warm weather year-round, no state tax and relative affordability. As such, the market is seeing large enterprise retail and consumer goods companies claiming their stake in the Sunshine State. Robust leasing activity The total industrial leasing volume in the Orlando market for the second-quarter 2022 was 4.5 million square feet, 43 percent of the total leasing volume seen in 2021. Eight leases over 100,000 square feet were signed to date in 2022. The largest lease in the first half of 2022 was the new 294,787-square-foot Coca-Cola lease …

Amid a record-breaking year for Miami-Dade County in 2021, industrial market fundamentals grew even stronger in the first quarter of 2022. Last year, the national industrial market saw unprecedented activity resulting from unlimited investment capital from Wall Street, private equity firms and REITs deploying significant capital into buying existing income-producing property and development sites. In the first quarter of 2022, market fundamentals continued to heat up in Miami-Dade County and are expected to continue to attract investors and developers that are looking to capitalize on a growing population and soaring demand for warehousing space. The ongoing global supply chain challenges are forcing existing tenants’ requirements to include additional warehouse space for storage. Simultaneously, new-to-market tenants are continuing to flock to the area, despite a shrinking supply of available space. Together, this confluence of activity triggered a record low vacancy rate of 2.7 percent in Miami-Dade County in the first quarter, a 150-basis-point decrease year-over-year. Rental rates also reached a record high of $11.80 per square foot triple-net, which is an increase of 8.3 percent year-over-year. We expect continued growth in port markets, as well as increased leasing activity from third-party logistics and e-commerce tenants. In 2021, Amazon leased multiple locations …

Orlando’s industrial market emerged from the early panic of 2020 in solid shape, and both occupier and investment activity have continued in earnest ever since. While the preceding year has brought its share of pandemic-induced challenges to the Orlando market, the industrial sector itself has not been adversely affected, other than by labor shortages and the escalating prices of construction materials for new development. Sector fundamentals remain strong, with healthy leasing and positive net absorption of space, robust tenant activity and continued speculative development that is focused primarily along the 429 Corridor and in the Orlando Central Park and Airport/Southeast submarkets. Economic fundamentals are also sound. The unemployment rate in Orlando as of June 2021 was 6 percent, down an impressive 1,300 basis points from the height of pandemic unemployment in May 2020. Oxford Economics projects that Orlando is expected to see job growth of 2.1 percent in 2021, 9.1 percent in 2022 and should recover all of its lost jobs by third-quarter 2022, a majority of which are in the leisure and hospitality sector. Central Florida is the state’s fastest-growing region, and the U.S. Census Bureau expects its growth to outpace South Florida by a factor of two to …