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. …
