Texas Market Reports

The agriculture industry, long an economic staple of the Rio Grande Valley (RGV), has been at the forefront of the region’s industrial expansion and is seeing its role elevated with more product coming from Mexico. Over the last several years, road and bridge infrastructure improvements throughout Mexico’s southwestern regions have laid the groundwork for increased traffic of produce-carrying trucks headed northeast to the border area. Ports of entry throughout the RGV have become the top destinations for agricultural imports, surpassing the longtime leader of Nogales, Ariz. This has heightened cross-border trade activity throughout the South Texas ports of entry. Most notably, the Pharr, Texas, port of entry has increased the most in terms of activity, which has led to greater absorption and development of industrial product throughout the McAllen metro area. The prime example of this infrastructural development is the Baluarte Bicentennial Bridge. The 3,700-foot, cable-stayed bridge opened in 2013, connecting the Mexican coastal city of Mazatlan to the inland port of Durango and shortening delivery times for product en route to the U.S. border by four to six hours. As a result, a significant amount of the new industrial development in recent years has centered on cold storage facilities. …

Businesses and industries whose supply chains are tied to Port Houston are dealing with tariffs on select imports, volatile energy markets and a one-two punch of rising rents and construction costs for any industrial space they want to lease or have developed for them. But based on the performance of Houston’s nearby Southeast industrial submarket, these larger geopolitical and economic forces are wreaking minimal havoc. An increasingly diverse mix of industrial users has landed in Houston over the past five or so years. These tenants include national retailers and third-party logistics (3PL) firms that see Houston as an emerging regional distribution hub, as well as suppliers of durable consumer goods and companies that service the petrochemicals industry. The port submarket is seeing heightened activity from all of the above. At the same time, the infrastructure within Port Houston has expanded. Ship channels are in the process of being deepened and widened. Special equipment has been introduced that allows overweight containers to safely and legally leave the port and hit the roadways. Demand for rail-served properties is growing, particularly on the north side of the Houston Ship Channel, leading to more of those projects. And Harris County has begun work on …

The current pace of development and absorption of manufacturing and warehousing space in El Paso reveals just how closely the local economy is linked to that of its sister city across the border, Ciudad Juárez. Mexico’s maquiladora system allows foreign companies to produce and export materials to that company’s home country, largely on a duty- and tariff-free basis. When the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was passed in the mid-1990s, maquiladora activity saw its largest historical increase while still facing considerable competition from China for foreign investment. But when American manufacturers realized that outsourcing production to China didn’t translate to more efficient supply chains, they once again looked toward Mexico, which also boasted strong supplies of affordable labor. With the United States now locked in a trade dispute with China, the economic development initiatives offered by the current Mexican Presidential Administration and the threat of a drastically renegotiated NAFTA agreement having passed, American companies are beginning to return to Mexico. Ciudad Juárez is among the Mexican cities benefitting most from this activity, and it is translating to greater demand for storage and distribution space in El Paso. Many maquiladora companies count end users in southwestern U.S. markets as significant …

Even before the city’s population growth began exploding and its reputation as a tech hub became entrenched, Austin was always a true last-mile market for industrial users.  Now that e-commerce has morphed into a worldwide phenomenon with real staying power, Austin looks like one of the next ideal locations for institutional industrial developers to make their marks with larger projects.  However, the market does present a handful of challenges, including an intricate entitlement process, expensive land and a slightly higher cost of construction as compared to Texas’ other major markets. These barriers to entry have helped characterize the Austin industrial market we see today, with local developers leading the way. The Austin Market Today From both a developer’s and a broker’s perspective, the biggest advantage of being in a high-barrier-to-entry market, aside from less competition, is that the likelihood of becoming overbuilt is minimized.  We saw this in 2008 and 2009, when the recession forced industrial users to cut operating costs and landlords to lower rents. Like the rest of the country, Austin took some hits during the Great Recession and saw a handful of properties foreclosed upon. But due to minimal new development, the market was able to maintain …