While the Wichita industrial market may lack the size of its neighbor to the east — Kansas City — it still has a strong and relatively stable presence. Wichita is driven by the aviation industry, and several major aircraft manufacturers and suppliers call the city home. Overall, Wichita has traditionally been an owner-use market with some leasing from larger national companies. With the credit markets dried up and a construction pipeline that has never been that large to begin with, most activity in Wichita lately has been leasing. “January through April, leasing activity was pretty slim, but we are starting to see a lot more inquiries; there are a lot more people in the market looking to relocate, mostly to keep their rents the same in a newer facility,” says Bradley Tidemann, an associate with locally based J.P. Weigand & Sons. Some notable transactions include Weckworth Manufacturing’s purchase of a 100,000-square-foot facility south of the city in Haysville. The owner-user had previously been leasing. In addition, a 50,000-square-foot office and flex warehouse deal is expected to close this month to a local owner-user. On the leasing side, Associated Materials has relocated from a 12,000-square-foot facility to a 35,000-square-foot facility. Additionally, …
Market Reports
For Doug Malone, a retail brokerage and leasing associate with Wichita, Kansas-based J.P. Wiegand & Sons, “The good news about Wichita is that we have been a little pocket of prosperity for a number of years, and we didn’t get hit until just recently with the economic problems that the rest of the country had.” While retail in larger markets struggles, the smaller Wichita market has remained steady. This is due partly to the conservative nature of real estate professionals in the market and partly due to the fact that overbuilding tends to happen less in secondary markets. But the recession is starting to be seen here. “Wichita has a tendency to feel those impacts last and to come out them last as well, but we don’t have the real ups and downs of a lot of other markets” Malone says. “Although, what we’re seeing now, in terms of a slowdown in retail activity, we probably haven’t seen this kind of slowdown since post-9/11.” This slowdown has many retailers taking a wait-and-see approach when it comes to doing deals. Since most major new projects in the market are done by local developers — who know the market and can withstand …
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