Louisville has a lot going for it when it comes to logistics. In addition to its prime location on the Ohio River, the city benefits from three major interstates running through it: Interstates 64, 65 and 71. I-65 is considered a Tier 1 Corridor due to the high volume of trucks that travel over this route, connecting Chicago and Indianapolis through Louisville to the Southern states. Louisville’s location also allows companies to reach 60 percent of the country’s population within a 12-hour drive. Perhaps most importantly, Louisville is home to UPS Worldport, the largest automated package handling facility in the world, and the center point of UPS’s worldwide air network. More than 300 flights arrive and depart daily, and the hub processes roughly two million packages a day and more than 4 million during peak holiday shipping season. E-commerce lives here and UPS offers customers the ability to drop shipments at Worldport much later in the day, compared to other cities, while still providing next morning/day delivery. Louisville is not only a great logistics hub, it has a strong manufacturing base. Louisville is home to GE Appliance Park and two Ford Plants: Louisville Assembly Plant and Kentucky Truck Plant. Louisville …
Industrial
The Columbus industrial market continues to thrive as a hot center for logistics, warehousing and manufacturing. Its strategic location within a one-day truck drive of 50 percent of the U.S. population and one-third of the Canadian population is an important part of this success. Other contributing factors to this success include a strong Midwestern work ethic, low cost of real estate, low taxes, low wages and minimal union activity. With a total population of about 2 million in metro Columbus, central Ohio has 86,000 employees in the manufacturing industry and 80,000 employees in logistics at 4,100 logistics companies. Positive vital signs Central Ohio’s 273-million-square-foot industrial real estate market continues to expand with nearly 5.7 million square feet of new construction in 2017. Year to date, there has been 1.3 million square feet of positive net absorption and vacancy is 4.6 percent, down from 5.1 percent as of year-end 2016. Net absorption totaled 9 million square feet in 2016. Effective rental rates in central Ohio range from $2 to $3.75 per square foot net for larger warehouse and manufacturing spaces. Operating expenses run from 35 cents to $1.25 per square foot. Sales prices will range from $10 to $45 per square …
At the mid-year mark, the Richmond industrial market has continued to strengthen, closing with an overall occupancy rate of 91 percent in the categories being tracked — Class A, B and C vacant and investor-owned product with a minimum of 40,000 square feet of total rentable building area (RBA). Class A occupancy decreased slightly from 96 percent at the end of the first quarter to 95 percent at the end of the second quarter, and Class B occupancy has remained steady at 92 percent. The year-to-date net absorption is in excess of 1.5 million square feet, in part due to lower reported vacancies in the Class C former tobacco storage complex located south of downtown Richmond. The inventory of quality, freestanding facilities available for owner/users to purchase remains in short supply, with central locations in even greater demand and experiencing a shorter shelf life. CoStar reports overall industrial occupancy at 95 percent for products of all sizes, including investor-owned facilities, but excluding flex space (minimum 50 percent office). Richmond’s strategic Mid-Atlantic location along Interstate 95 provides access to 55 percent of the nation’s consumers within two days delivery by truck. In addition to being the northernmost right-to-work state on the …
With an inventory of about 63 million square feet, El Paso’s industrial market has played a pivotal role in the business of commercial real estate for the past 10 years. During that stretch, portfolio trades have come to dominate industrial transactions in this market. For example, Dallas-based Stonelake Capital Partners recently added to its holdings by buying four buildings from 5 Star Real Estate in Vista Del Sol East totaling about 567,000 square feet. Stonelake had entered the market several years prior after buying 11 buildings totaling roughly 1 million square feet in Butterfield Trail Industrial Park from two separate entities, Louis Kennedy and Lincoln Properties. Other defining examples of trades include the activity of IndCore, a Blackstone company that began buying Industrial real estate in El Paso in 2010. The company purchased 1.2 million square feet of assets from Prologis; 1 million square feet of space from Northwestern Mutual Credit and 1.2 million square feet of product from UBS. In addition, Allstate foreclosed approximately 500,000 square feet of the KASCO portfolio in 2011, which was re-sold to Covington Capital in 2015. CIII Capital Partners absorbed eight buildings totaling 900,000 square feet from Titan Industrial in 2012. Soon after, CIII …
CHICAGO — Duke Realty Corp. (NYSE: DRE) has purchased a 10-building industrial portfolio totaling nearly 3.5 million square feet, plus two additional land parcels, for $515 million. The assets are situated in Southern California, Northern New Jersey and South Florida. The two parcels will eventually contain two buildings totaling 852,745 square feet. Construction on these projects will commence later this year. The total value of the portfolio will be approximately $700 million once construction is completed. The seller, Bridge Development Partners, has completed more than $2 billion in developments and acquisitions since its joint venture with Dallas-based Banner Oak Capital Partners in 2013. Bridge’s current pipeline contains more than 10.3 million square feet valued at $1.3 billion in the most supply constrained U.S. core industrial markets, including Chicago, Miami, New Jersey, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. “This portfolio sale is part of the $1.1 billion of new state-of-the-art industrial assets Bridge will sell in 2017,” says Steve Poulos, the company’s founder and CEO. “The portfolio includes a mix of fully stabilized, partially stabilized and completely vacant assets.” Though the exact properties included in this transaction were not disclosed, some of Bridge’s assets include the 306,466-square-foot Bridge Point I-95 in …
Orlando’s industrial market is coming into its own. As high-profile users such as Amazon, Samsung and Best Buy continue to enter the market, major brands are taking a fresh approach to Central Florida’s logistical advantages, and an increased number of national REITs are combing the area for any opportunity they can uncover. Despite an unprecedented boom of speculative industrial building, demand continues to outpace supply. In the industrial sphere, Orlando has become the juggernaut of Florida. This growth has been fueled by a number of overlapping factors. Tourism has always been a huge driver for Orlando’s industrial sector. Disney World remains North America’s most-visited theme park. The convention business is thriving and Port Canaveral is one of the top cruise industry ports in the world, attracting some of the largest ships. Now, the area’s tech industry is taking off as well. The $75 million, 100,000-square-foot manufacturing research center, BRIDG — just delivered in Osceola County — will be a catalyst for further growth in high-tech manufacturing and research. Add to this the second fastest rate of population growth in the nation, and the city once known primarily as Florida’s tourist mecca is primed for commercial expansion. On the national level, …
The St. Louis industrial market has enjoyed robust growth in recent years in part because of a growing economy, the rise of e-commerce and 3PL activity, favorable tax incentives and abatement packages and a movement to quality from existing users. With a population of 37.5 million in a 300-mile radius and over 96 million in a 500-mile radius, St. Louis is a distribution force to be reckoned with. Over the past five years, vacancy has dropped from 9 percent to 4.1 percent as of the second quarter of 2017. This number, paired with asking lease rates rising 9 percent during that same time frame, illustrate the health of the market. With more than 2.7 million square feet of space absorbed already this year, the 4.2 million square feet currently under construction will be absorbed quickly. Low vacancies have spurred the need for speculative space, which has increased at a rate not seen before in this market. Recent ongoing or completed projects include a 548,850-square-foot space at Aviator Business Park, 158,000 square feet at Fenton Logistics Park and two 100,000-square-foot buildings at Hazelwood Logistics Center. Having spec product on the market places St. Louis on the radars of users that require …
Eastern Pennsylvania’s industrial markets continue to thrive due to low vacancy rates, increased barriers to entry, demand by occupiers and the institutional capital community’s ever-increasing appetite for industrial product. While the specific submarkets have unique nuances associated with the local economic drivers, highway networks, taxation, and labor base, the overall demand by tenants and the capital community alike is driven by elementary economic rules of supply versus demand met by supply chain demand drivers. In a world that is buying a higher percentage of its goods online each and every year, this geography offers the unique ability to reach almost half of the U.S. population within a one-day truck drive and better one-day or two-day delivery service from the two major providers, UPS and FedEx. This thriving market is technically four distinct submarkets inclusive of the Lehigh Valley, Northeastern, Central and Southeastern Pennsylvania. For those less familiar with the nomenclature of this geography, it’s easiest to think of the Lehigh Valley as the general vicinity of Easton through Bethlehem and Allentown and along I-78 past Hamburg. Central Pennsylvania is the region inclusive of Harrisburg, York, Carlisle, Chambersburg, Greencastle and Lancaster. Northeastern Pennsylvania is the combination of the MSAs including Pottsville, …
The need for storage and distribution space for the variety of fruits and vegetables imported from Mexico has long been a driver of industrial demand in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV). Overall industrial occupancy is on the rise throughout the region — about 92 percent in the Greater McAllen Area — and the role of agriculture is becoming a major part of it. The agriculture industry has fueled rapid growth in the RGV city of Pharr and continues to bolster its economic prosperity today. As a global agricultural powerhouse, Pharr is home to a variety of thriving businesses in the agriculture industry. The Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge represents the sixth-largest land (in the United States and currently processes more than $30 billion in international trade on an annual basis. The most influential element behind this uptick has not been agrarian, financial or demographic, but rather infrastructural and on the Mexico side of the region. The Baluarte Bicentennial Bridge, a 3,700-foot cable-stayed bridge completed in late 2013, provides direct access from the Pacific coast city of Mazatlan to the inland metro area of Durango. From Durango, product can be transported directly to the Mexico border city of Reynosa, which has a thriving …
The industrial market in Charlotte is healthy, with trends pointing to another solid year of net absorption and rent growth. The market continues to attract institutional capital, as cap rates hover slightly below 6 percent for Class A product in the metro’s primary submarkets. Charlotte’s job growth continues to drive population migration into the market. More than 37,000 new jobs have been added in the past 12 months, dropping the unemployment rate from 5.2 percent to 4.9 percent. North Carolina has a young, educated workforce and boasts 53 universities and colleges. The state is nationally recognized for its labor climate. Major employers span the gamut of the business world, from financial and energy stalwarts such as Bank of America and Wells Fargo, Duke Energy and Siemen’s Energy Inc., to more industrial players such as Daimler Trucks North America, Lowe’s, FedEx and Snyder’s-Lance Inc. Charlotte is a logistically sound market, with the city’s airport ranking as the eighth busiest in the U.S., according to the Federal Aviation Administration. A relatively new intermodal rail facility and continued investment in road infrastructure projects are also helping to foster an optimistic environment. The HB2 legislation, which proved a major obstacle to attracting new companies …