Market Reports

2021 has been an absolute whirlwind for the Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) industrial market. Plunging cap rates, liquidity growing faster than ever and a sharply felt shortage of new supply have defined the last year and will continue to define 2022. New faces on the development side are entering the market right and left to capture the huge profits to be had from the supply/demand imbalance. New construction has been stabilizing in six to eight months and institutions have ear-marked MSP as a forward-sale market.  The following are a few of the salient trends that should be considered when contemplating the MSP industrial market. Liquidity growth Since the last trough in 2016, the MSP industrial market has experienced an average 30 percent year-over-year growth in sales volume. 2021 experienced nearly half a billion dollars more in industrial investment sales than 2020, according to Real Capital Analytics. Cap rate compression Over the last year, the MSP industrial market has experienced change unlike in any other year.  Entering 2021, the low-water stabilized cap rate was 5.15 percent, but by year-end, that had sunk 82 basis points to 4.33 percent. Warehouse rates in the $8 to $9 NNN range, once rare, are now commonplace; …

By Peter Loehrer, Colliers MSP Minneapolis has secured its position as the darling market of the Midwest industrial investment community. Minneapolis was the quintessential Midwest city: cautious real estate development, durable rents with stately growth and moderate but unwavering absorption growth year to year.  This, however, is no longer the case. A combination of repeated institutional capital injections, a highly constrained land market and exponential growth in tenants looking for new space has transformed Minneapolis into an institutional and foreign capital target market. Institutional capital By far the most transformational event in recent history for the Minneapolis industrial market was Link Industrial’s entrance into the market. Beginning in 2018 with the Gramercy acquisition, and continuing in 2019 with the Space Center acquisition — both of which have bits and pieces of the national portfolio located throughout Minneapolis — Link made its first real foray into Minneapolis in May of 2019 with the acquisition of the 2.2 million-square-foot Industrial Equities portfolio.  Link quickly followed this up with pieces of the GLP and Colony Capital acquisitions, as well as the largest real estate purchase in Minneapolis history, the 7.2 million-square-foot CSM Corp. industrial portfolio, and most recently the 2.5 million-square-foot Prologis portfolio.  …

By Joe Mahoney, Opus Development Co. Despite a confluence of major events in 2020 that shook our world — the pandemic, social unrest, historically high rates of unemployment — the industrial real estate market in the Twin Cities fared very well. While positive net absorption was limited in the second quarter of 2020, the rate accelerated to 1.1 million square feet during the fourth quarter and ended the year at 3.2 million square feet, according to CBRE Minneapolis-St. Paul. Active users also increased. In the beginning of 2020, there were 6.4 million square feet of users. At the end of the third quarter, that number had increased to 10 million, and by the end of the year, there were close to 12 million square feet of users, almost doubling over the course of the year. We see user demand continuing to trend up and accelerate this year. To support growth plans, users are looking for highly functional manufacturing, warehousing and distribution facilities. Many businesses are increasing efficiency and productivity by consolidating several obsolete buildings into one new highly functional, build-to-suit space. COVID-19 supply chain disruption has prompted some businesses to increase their footprint for storing more inventory and reducing reliance …