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. …
Market Reports
By Steve Solomon, Senior Executive Vice President, and Kristen Bowman, First Vice President, Colliers International Greater Los Angeles leasing activity surged, reaching nearly 3 million square feet in the second quarter. Although higher than the past few quarters, it was significantly lower than the 2019 pre-pandemic quarterly average of 4.6 million square feet. Much of the activity occurred in West Los Angeles, where large expansions and renewals were signed by tech, media and entertainment tenants. While leasing did ramp up, overall vacancy continued to rise, eventually reaching a historic high of 19.4 percent. This rate, which includes direct and sublease space, is 160 basis points higher than the previous peak in 2013 when it hit 17.8 percent. Nearly 25 percent of office space, whether vacant or currently occupied, is available for lease. There is currently 4.9 million square feet of speculative new office construction underway delivering by 2023 in Greater Los Angeles. These major developments, which do not include renovations, are currently 30.7 percent pre-leased. Over half of this new construction is in West Los Angeles, which has a higher pre-leased rate of 36.6 percent. The rate is highest in Central Los Angeles, where Netflix has snatched up 44.6 percent …
By Drew Ricciardi, Research Manager, ABI Multifamily Research Manager Following a chaotic year that left investors on the sidelines, the Phoenix market proved resilient. In fact, it ended up witnessing one of the most significant rebounds nationally. The Phoenix multifamily market exploded with a record start for 2021 and is now considered one of the top multifamily markets in the country. Phoenix continues to see robust population increases due to job growth, quality of life, industry diversity and affordability. According to a Redfin study, the Phoenix metro market had the highest population net inflow in 2020 of all U.S. metros. Phoenix benefited from the work-from-home phenomenon due to COVID-19, which resulted in high-paid workers fleeing high-priced, high-density markets for more affordable markets offering more spacious living options. Not only are people migrating to Phoenix, but the area is becoming a prime spot for company headquarters and advanced facilities. The metro area’s educated workforce, strong talent pool, business-friendly tax environment, and affordability are all key factors. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. plans to invest around $35 billion in new Phoenix facilities. This is the most substantial direct foreign investment in Arizona to date. The investment will have significant ripple effects on the …
Contrary to what is often portrayed in the national media, the Orlando office market is not a monolith. It instead comprises multiple submarkets, many of which are recovering quite differently. For example, according to data from CoStar Group, Winter Park had a 4.7 percent availability rate (that’s direct and sublease space combined). The Downtown Orlando market, on the other hand, had a rate of 16.9 percent. The total Orlando MSA office availability rate was 11.5 percent, which compares to the national rate of 16 percent. All of these numbers just prove that the recovery from the pandemic is uneven, even in areas in close proximity. It’s easy to get lost in analysis, but the basic answer is that the office market in Orlando, just like in the entire country, will recover in time. Not all areas will be on the same timeline, and the office market will never look entirely the same. Between working from home and companies deciding to relocate their offices or headquarters entirely, there will be some short-term winners and losers. Texas, for instance, is having a relative boom in new tenants. Los Angeles, and indeed California in general, on the other hand, is not. Many companies …
By Taylor Williams Relative to a year ago, life is much better right now for many retailers and restaurants in Philadelphia’s Center City district, but the recent surge of transmission of the Delta variant is keeping a key ingredient of the demand recipe at bay: office users. According to CBRE’s second-quarter report on the Philadelphia office market, the most current data available at the time of this writing, the marketwide vacancy rate was 18.9 percent at the end of that period. Specifically with regard to the downtown area, the largest office submarket by far in terms of inventory, vacancy stood at 14.7 percent at the end of the second quarter. Office metrics aside, as Philadelphia grappled with the novelty of COVID-19 in 2020, its merchants and food purveyors adapted, adjusting inventory levels, rolling out improvised outdoor seating areas and expanding takeout and curbside pick-up options. The colder months saw the introduction of igloos — enclosed, heated nooks for private dining — as well as larger, city-led efforts to clear major retail corridors for street-side experiences, known locally as “streateries.” The innovations saved many-a-retailer and restaurant and are likely here to continue through 2021 and beyond. Yet within the city’s most …
World and domestic markets are constantly recalibrating as the global supply chain continues to see a disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic. It has never been more clear though just how important freight logistics and a healthy supply chain are to keep the economy moving. Demand for distribution space continues to grow, and the latest data available reveals the bi-state St. Louis market is rebounding well from the uncertainty of 2020 and 2021, and is positioned to assist distributors and developers to meet the growing demand. The St. Louis region has more than 51 million square feet of modern bulk inventory supported by a strong labor force and an exceptional freight network that provides tremendous optionality to move goods into and out of the region via river, rail, truck and runway. Those advantages are contributing to historic lows in vacancy rates, with only 4.5 percent of modern bulk space (more than 250,000 square feet) available at this time. This follows on the heels of the overall vacancy rate for the entire St. Louis industrial market dropping below 6 percent in 2020, the first time it fell so low in more than 15 years. Fortunately, construction in the bi-state region has rebounded …
By Robert Flores, Senior Vice President, CBRE Not too long ago, industrial real estate was generally viewed as an obscure and often unpopular subset of commercial real estate. Instead of owning a concrete box, many investors and developers were drawn to the flashier structures in Central Business Districts and hip submarkets. Fast forward a few short years, and industrial has firmly taken center stage for many who might have previously shunned the sector. The Greater Los Angeles area is one of the beneficiaries. The Greater Los Angeles region is the second-largest metro in the U.S. and is home to some of the nation’s most critical infrastructure. With the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach accounting for more than 40 percent of the country’s inbound container traffic and Los Angeles International Airport serving as a major gateway for passengers and air cargo, the local industrial market is ground zero for industrial users. At the close of the second quarter, the Greater Los Angeles industrial market totaled more than 1 billion square feet of rentable space with a vacancy rate of just above 1.5 percent, according to our CBRE research. Based on current activity levels and leasing velocity in the market, …
By Rob Martensen, Executive Vice President, Colliers As a racing driver, it is important that my vehicles fire on all cylinders to run their best. In the Phoenix metro area, the engine cylinders of the industrial market are the different industries, as well as the geographic locations around the Valley where these industries conduct business. First, let’s look at advanced manufacturing. Intel, which already has a large presence in the Southeast Valley, just announced a $20 billion expansion of its Price Road facility. This will create hundreds of construction jobs and demand for these contractors to find space, not to mention all the equipment suppliers, etc., that will require space for the long-term. With the huge demand for semiconductors and the supply of land and labor, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has chosen Phoenix to build its next fabrication plant. TSMC will spend $12 billion to build the new factory, which is already under construction in North Phoenix. This will create a huge demand for industrial space in the Deer Valley submarket to support TSMC. Other manufacturing companies like Apel Extrusions, MLILY and Ball Container have either recently completed projects or are under construction on new manufacturing facilities. Food and beverage …
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 …
By Tim McFarland, Sansone Group It is hard to describe 2020 as anything other than a lost year. COVID-19 brought us quarantines, social distancing, masks and plenty of uncertainty. The pandemic pushed our healthcare system to the brink, stressed our supply chain and caused a global economic slowdown. The St. Louis commercial real estate market certainly felt the effects of COVID-19, with retail and hospitality being hit the hardest. The retail sector was turned upside down by lockdowns that transformed homes into virtual offices, mandates that forced the closure of non-essential businesses and capacity restrictions that required restaurants to learn how to survive without dine-in business for a large portion of the year. These factors have caused an increase in vacancy to nearly 5 percent, and average asking rates to soften to $13.02 per square foot, off by 15 cents per square foot from this time last year. Perhaps most intriguing was seeing trends in the retail market accelerated by COVID-19. E-commerce For years now there has been a trend toward e-commerce. That is true now more than ever as the pandemic has accelerated the drive to digital. More than five years of e-commerce adoption was compressed into a three-month …