Tag Archive for: warehouse construction

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Palm Beach County commissioners recently approved three large-scale commercial projects in the Agricultural Reserve, two of them across the street from each other on Boynton Beach Boulevard at the Acme Dairy Road intersection.

The District, if the county approves a zoning change, could be open in about two years. It will consist of 16 indoor pickleball courts, warehouses and a storage facility with wine lockers. It would be built in the Ag Reserve off Boynton Beach Boulevard and Acme Dairy Road (Rendering Credit: The Channing Corporation)

One of the projects, The District, will feature indoor pickleball courts, a fitness center, a microbrewery with a tap room, warehouses and a storage facility that will have lockers for expensive wines. Construction could begin by the middle of next year. It will be built on 47.2 acres.

To make it happen, county commissioners had to approve a land-use and zoning change, which they voted unanimously on Aug. 24 to do. Two prominent South Florida developers, the Channing Corporation and the Butters Group, will now move forward with their building plans.

Channing said he and his partner, Malcom Butters, worked with the area residents to give them what they wanted.

The plans were developed in consultation with two residents groups, the Coalition of Boynton West Residential Associations and the Boynton Ag Reserve Communities.

On the south side of Boynton Beach Boulevard will be Logan Ranch, a residential community that would include apartments and possibly townhouses. At the meeting, the developer said 314 residences are planned, with most of them apartments with 79 of them set aside as workforce housing.

Developer of the Logan Ranch apartment complex moved buildings farther away from Canyon Trails to gain community support. County commissioners approved the project Thursday. The site is at the southeast corner of Acme Dairy Road and Boynton Beach Boulevard. (Image Credit: Palm Beach County Zoning Division)

Plans call for six four-story buildings and seven two-story buildings. The smaller ones would contain the townhouses.

Also approved Thursday was a land-use change on 8 acres on the west side of State Road 7 near Atlantic Avenue. The builder expects to construct warehouses and office space on the parcel. The project can be no more than 155,000 square feet. The builder said there is a need for light industrial uses to serve the area’s increasing residential population.

 

Source: The Palm Beach Post

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The owner of Bedner’s Farm Fresh Market, a popular agricultural attraction, has proposed rezoning part of its land west of Boynton Beach for industrial development.

Bedner’s Farm Fresh Market has proposed industrial rezoning on the two parcels outlined in red in Palm Beach County.
(IMAGE CREDIT: JMORTON PLANNING AND LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE)

Bedner Brothers Farms, managed by Stephen Bedner, filed a land use amendment with Palm Beach County officials concerning 14 acres of the 19-acre site at 10066 Lee Road, on the west side of U.S. 441.

The Bedner family proposed changing the zoning of the strawberry and pumpkin fields from agricultural to commerce/light industrial, which would allow up to 274,428 square feet of industrial uses. That could include warehouses, flex office/warehouse or self-storage facilities. However, the five-acre site including the farmer’s market would be preserved through a conservation easement.

The land use amendment will require County Commission approval. A hearing before the board is tentatively scheduled for Nov. 1.

 

Source: SFBJ

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The nine-acre truck depot in Kearny, New Jersey, wouldn’t appear to fit anyone’s definition of prime real estate.

The site is surrounded by a tangle of major highways that are often clogged with traffic, abuts a rail yard packed with clattering freight cars, and is just down the street from one of the most polluted landfills on the northern New Jersey waterfront.

To Andy Smith, a managing director at Brookfield Asset Management and the global head of its logistics investments, the parcel, located less than 10 miles outside of New York City, was as attractive as any of the top-tier properties his company owns. This past December, Brookfield paid a little more than $67 million to acquire the site at 1100 Newark Turnpike, which it plans to continue to operate as a terminal for trucks.

“I’m not sure if someone driving down the highway would look out and think, ‘Hey, that’s an immaculate truck terminal,'” Smith conceded. “But as crazy as it sounds, it’s fantastic real estate.”

Brookfield’s portfolio is still headlined by blue-chip real-estate assets such as the Manhattan West mixed-use complex in New York City, where major office tenants, like the law firm Skadden Arps, base their operations, and Canary Wharf, a similarly large-scale London property with a mix of office, retail, and residential space. But the development and investment firm, whose global real-estate portfolio includes $260 billion of property, has also amassed about $500 million — and counting — of industrial land sites across the country since 2018.

Brookfield is one of several big-name investors that are paying increasing attention to lowly industrial land. Recent buyers include the financial firm J.P. Morgan Asset Management, the private-equity players Fortress and Cerberus, and real-estate-focused investment giants, including Brookfield and the San Francisco-based firm Stockbridge.

Industrial land is used for a range of purposes, such as parking trucks and buses, storage for bulky equipment like cranes, cherry pickers, and bulldozers, and a place to stage heavy goods that can weather exposure to the elements including gravel, lumber, or shipping containers. The interest in industrial land reflects the growing recognition that these sites are as essential as they are ordinary, providing key infrastructure for the delivery of goods and services to large swaths of America.

Such land has been around for as long as the country has had heavy industry. What’s new is the rush of major investors who see a lucrative opportunity to corporatize a niche of the real-estate market that is still overwhelmingly owned by an array of small businesses and individuals. The segment has even been rechristened with a more sophisticated-sounding moniker: industrial outdoor storage, or IOS.

Investors estimate there’s at least $200 billion of industrial-outdoor-storage land across the country, a sizable enough market for years of investment to come. IOS sites have caught on as an unlikely institutional-caliber asset as other more established areas of the real-estate-investment market, like office buildings and retail space, have been upended by the growing popularity of working from home and online shopping.

There’s A Shrinking Supply Of Industrial Land  

Another factor that has helped ignite interest in this unheralded corner of the industrial market is the fact that outdoor-storage sites are a disappearing commodity, driving up rents and their value.

That’s especially true in northern New Jersey (just outside New York City), Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and other major cities across the country, where land is scarce, populations are large, and transportation infrastructure like highways, cargo ports, rail links, and airports abound. In these places, industrial areas have been whittled down for decades by demand to convert those districts to other uses, such as residential and commercial space.

More recently, a boom of warehouse construction has cut into the already-shrinking pool of outdoor-storage land. A record 446 million square feet of warehouse space was finished last year across the country, according to CBRE. The huge volume of new warehouse development has not only thinned the number of remaining outdoor-storage sites, but also created additional demand for it.

“Many warehouses just weren’t designed for the parking, storage, and staging requirements that come from the enormous throughput of goods traveling in these spaces today and the speed at which they’re moving,” said Matthew Pfeiffer, a managing partner at Alterra Property Group, which invests in IOS sites. “That has created increased demand for outdoor-storage needs that benefits us.”

Pfeiffer, for instance, said that Alterra, which was founded in 2017 in Philadelphia, is in the process of negotiating a lease for an 11-acre site in South Florida next to a new warehouse that was recently leased by a large shipping and logistics company. The shipping and logistics company, he said, realized its warehouse operations will require additional parking capacity on Alterra’s site. Pfeiffer said he couldn’t yet disclose the details of that transaction, including the location of the parcel or the identity of the players involved, because the deal is ongoing.

Investment In Industrial Is Just Taking Off 

Buyers of these parcels see a supply-and-demand imbalance that is likely to persist and generate profits for years to come.

“There’s only so much land that’s zoned for industrial uses,” said Dan Haroun, who cofounded the Manhattan-based IOS investment firm Catalyst Investment Partners in 2021. “And these municipalities aren’t going to create more of it.”

Outdoor-storage sites are different from many other real-estate assets in that they need little in the way of capital upgrades and maintenance to prevent them from becoming obsolete. Industrial land also generally has lower operating costs and taxes compared to other real estate.

Haroun said tenants pay a wide range of rents that often depend on the specific attributes and location of a site. IOS space can cost just a few thousand dollars per acre per month in smaller markets, he said, up to $60,000-$70,000 for well located sites in large, space constrained urban areas.

IOS sites are not always completely vacant, but are generally defined as having 30% or less of their land area covered by a building or structure. Brookfield’s Kearny truck terminal, for instance, has abundant parking, but also a long, narrow building that allows goods to be unloaded and transferred between truck trailers.

It’s Hard To Find Big Enough Portfolios Of Industrial Land 

There are challenges, too, in breaking into the business of owning industrial land.

Unlike Brookfield’s transaction, most IOS sites are under $10 million, investors said, making it work-intensive to amass portfolios of the dollar scale substantial enough to attract institutional capital.

Fortress has compensated for that by acquiring properties at a rapid rate, purchasing 80 properties in the past 18 months, “one of the fastest acquisition pipelines in the IOS market,” said Greg Pearson, a managing director at the firm who helps manage its IOS acquisitions. The investment firm has bought roughly $1 billion of outdoor-storage sites over the past two years in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Seattle. Pearson said he expects the firm to “remain active,” buying up more IOS land in the coming year.

Others have found ways to buy at scale. Alterra, for instance, closed on an $86 million purchase of 14 outdoor-storage sites in December that were sold by the trucking company Heniff, which plans to continue to lease and occupy the properties. But Alterra has also built up its capacity to handle a larger volume of smaller IOS deals. The 75-person firm now has a 20-person investment team dedicated to IOS alone. It raised a $500 million fund for IOS investment in 2021 and is in the process of launching a follow-up vehicle that will be larger in size.

Catalyst, with a 10-person team, raised a $55 million fund in 2021 and is now raising a second fund that will be about $130 million, Haroun said. While the first fund was made up of mainly high-net-worth investors, the second will have larger-sized contributors, such as “pension funds and endowments,” Haroun said, a sign of the growing eagerness among institutional investors to partner with specialists who focus on IOS and can manage the transactional volume.

Zenith IOS, another outdoor-storage-investment firm that’s based in Brooklyn, struck a $550 million joint-venture deal with J.P. Morgan Asset Management in 2021 and is in the process of deploying that capital. So far it’s spent about $350 million of that and this year plans to use the remaining $200 million. Combined with financing, it expects to purchase roughly $600 million worth of IOS deals this year, Benjamin Atkins, the firm’s CEO and cofounder, said.

Atkins said he has been impressed by the robustness of the IOS market, even with fears about the broader economy. Zenith is currently in negotiations, for instance, to lease 8280 NW 80th Street, a three-acre site it purchased last summer in Miami for $9.1 million, to a logistics company that would use it for storage and vehicle parking.

“We’ve been looking for signs of weakness as other areas of commercial real estate slow down, but in IOS we’re not seeing it,” Atkins told Insider.

Zenith has such an appetite to expand its industrial-outdoor-storage portfolio that Atkins used Prologis, one of the world’s largest owners of warehouse space, as a benchmark for his ambitions.

“We want to be the Prologis of dirt,” Atkins said.

 

Source: Business Insider

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Industrial real estate rents increased and vacancies continued declining through November of 2022 despite a record amount of new supply hitting the market, according to the latest U.S. industrial market report from CommercialEdge.

Released just before Christmas, the report found that rents on in-place leases rose 6.5% nationally year over year, while the national vacancy rate dipped to 3.8%.

The new development pipeline also continued to increase, overcoming inflation-driven backlogs and bottlenecks along the supply chain. There were 742.3 million square feet of industrial space under construction as November ended, CommercialEdge reported.

Port markets led in November in both new leases and in-place rent growth. In line with trends seen in the past two years, Southern California in-place rents have climbed at the fastest rate, driven by double-digit growth in the Inland Empire and Los Angeles. On the East Coast, Boston and New Jersey saw the strongest rent hikes.

 

Source: ConnectCRE

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An affiliate of Vecellio Group broke ground on an industrial park near West Palm Beach after obtaining a $52.65 million construction loan.

United Bank of Charleston, West Virginia provided the mortgage to 101 Sansburys Way LLC, an affiliate of Vecellio Group, a construction materials firm and contractor. It covers the 32.8-acre site at the same address, which is on the north side of Southern Boulevard, just west of Florida’s Turnpike.

Fort Lauderdale-based Hernandez Construction recently filed notice with Palm Beach County that it started work on the project. The site was approved for three warehouses for a combined 435,800 square feet. The first phase is a 165,000-square-foot warehouse with 32-foot clear height.

The developer is working with Fort Lauderdale-based Helms Development on the project.

According to the fourth quarter report from Colliers, the Palm Beach County industrial market had a 3.2% vacancy rate, down from 3.6% a year earlier, amid 949,211 square feet of positive absorption over the year. There was 548,824 square feet under construction, so there was certainly room for more buildings based on the pace of absorption.

 

Source: SFBJ

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In Prologis’ recent third quarter earnings call, CEO Hamid Moghadam was blunt in his assessment of the industrial sector’s supply-demand equilibrium:

“With vacancies at unprecedented lows, space in our markets is effectively sold out.”

It is, of course, little secret that industrial rents are at a premium and tenants are jockeying for what space they can find. But new details in Prologis’ Industrial Business Indicator report show just how much of an uphill climb supply will have before it meets current and future demand.

Prologis reports that construction starts have risen to an all time high of 120 million square feet, with speculative construction representing roughly 88% of all starts in the quarter. But pre-leasing has also reached its own record of 70%. That, coupled with construction delays, which are spreading out deliveries, means the risk of oversupply is low.

“We do not anticipate significant supply relief in most key locations; new supply is concentrated in low-barrier secondary and tertiary markets and the outlying submarkets of inland markets,” Prologis Research said.

Indeed, it concludes that demand is set to outpace new supply through the near term. The reasons include the ongoing rise of e-commerce penetration and companies’ move to build resilience into their supply chains. In addition, retail sales are robust, and trillions of dollars in pent-up savings and record-high consumer net worth should support future spending growth.

Prologis Research forecasts net absorption of 375 million square feet and deliveries of 285 million square feet for the full year.

“Looking ahead, we expect that market conditions will remain exceptionally competitive for customers looking to expand, making it essential to plan early and move quickly.”

 

Source: GlobeSt.

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South Florida’s industrial market performed well in the fourth quarter and in 2020, as Amazon leased about 3 million square feet throughout the year, according to a recently released report.

The region’s average asking rent rose slightly to $8.88 in the year’s final quarter, up 1.6 percent year-over-year, according to the report from Newmark. The fourth quarter vacancy rate hit a low 4.9 percent, thanks to pre-leasing activity. About 6 million square feet of industrial space is currently under construction in the tri-county area, with more than half of it already leased.

Here is a breakdown for each of the counties:

Miami-Dade County

Miami-Dade’s vacancy rate stayed consistent at 4.5 percent for the fourth quarter. Average asking rent was $8.33, up 1 percent quarter-over-quarter, and up about 4 percent year-over-year.

The county saw 266,000 square feet of space delivered during the quarter. Miami-Dade represented more than half the region’s net absorption, with 2.7 square feet absorbed during 2020. Fifteen buildings totaling more than 3.1 million square feet are under construction, with 56 percent of that already leased. That means that it will not have much of an impact on the county’s vacancy rate this year, according to Newmark.

The top lease deals in the county included Keuhne & Nagel leasing 209,610 square feet at 3401 Northwest 72nd Avenue in Miami and IFS Neutral Maritime leasing 93,320 square feet of space at 1350 Northwest 121st Avenue in Miami.

Top industrial sales in the county included the $16.2 million sale of Doral warehouse by a family that owns an international logistics company.

Broward County

Broward’s vacancy rate continued to rise, reaching 5.6 percent at the end of the fourth quarter, the highest in the region. That’s an increase, quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year, of about 2 percent and 6 percent, respectively. But the vacancy rate remained below the 6 percent vacancy rate reported at the end of 2015.

The county saw 373,000 square feet of new space delivered during the quarter. About two-thirds of the 1.6 million square feet under construction is available for lease.

The average asking rent in the fourth quarter was $9.39, down 0.3 percent, year-over-year, and down 0.7 percent, quarter-over-quarter. Increased availability from second-tier space helped rents decrease, according to Newmark.

Amazon signed three of the top leases in the quarter in Broward for about 1 million square feet. Overall, Amazon is responsible for most of the largest leases signed during the year.

Elion Partners had two of the top purchases of the quarter, paying $31.5 million for a Dania Beach building and $12 million for Bennett Auto Supply in Pompano Beach.

Palm Beach County

The county’s vacancy rate was 5.4 percent in the fourth quarter, a new record high since at least the fourth quarter of 2015. Newmark credited this to the delivery of five buildings totaling over 768,000 square feet.

The average asking rent was $9.84, up 1 percent, quarter-over-quarter, and up 0.4 percent, year-over-year.

About 1.3 million square feet is under construction in the county, 1 million of it for an Amazon distribution center. The county had 77,000 square feet of industrial space absorbed during the fourth quarter.

The largest leases signed during the quarter include two in West Palm Beach: Tire Hub leasing 40,500 square feet of space at 305 Haverhill Road and Jamlyn Supply leasing 38,880 square feet of space at 6051 Southern Boulevard.

Top deals during the quarter included an Atlanta-based industrial investment group buying a newly built warehouse in the Palm Beach Park of Commerce for $27.2 million.

 

Source: The Real Deal

The city of Fort Lauderdale is soliciting bids, starting at just over $13 million, for a 24-acre industrial property in Dania Beach that could be developed into offices or warehouses.


4050-South-State-Road-7, Dania Beach site

Colliers International is overseeing the planned sale of the city-owned industrial property at 4030 State Road 7, just south of I-595. It’s one of Colliers’ first assignments from the city of Fort Lauderdale under its new contract to help manage the city’s real estate and dispose of surplus properties.

Fort Lauderdale requires potential buyers to submit sealed bids for the property in Dania Beach to the procurement division of the city’s finance department by Nov. 3. Sealed bids should include a cashier’s check or certified check to the city in an amount equal to 10 percent of the offered purchase price. Colliers would collect a commission at closing equal to 4 percent of the sale price.

Potential buyers must submit a minimum bid of $13.226 million, the appraised value of the property. The appraisal was completed Aug. 14 by Adrian Gonzalez, Jr., of Adrian Gonzalez & Associates P.A. in Hollywood. Terms of the sale would include payment of all closing costs by the buyer. No purchase money mortgage would be held by the city.

In a memo this week to city commissioners, City Manager Lee Feldman said Fort Lauderdale acquired the property in Dania Beach through eminent domain in February 1984. The property currently is used for motor vehicle training by the Fort Lauderdale Police Department, among other uses.

The 24-acre property, zoned I-G (industrial general) by the city of Dania Beach, has sewer and water service from Broward County. An active landfill along the north side of the property accepts only ash residue from the Wheelabrator South Broward trash-incineration facility located south of the property.

“There is, to the best of our knowledge, no contamination of the site,” said Steve Wasserman of Colliers International in South Florida. “The likely future uses of the property are office and warehouse development.”

Fort Lauderdale city commissioners declared the 24-acre site a surplus property and approved the city’s contract with Colliers at their meeting Tuesday, Chaz Adams, spokesperson for the city of Fort Lauderdale, said in an email.

“We expect Colliers to offer recommendations regarding the highest and best use for the properties that comprise our real estate portfolio,” Adams wrote in an email Thursday. “These recommendations may include the sale and disposition of city-owned surplus property. By returning property to the tax roll, the city can reduce operating costs, maximize resources, and generate additional revenue.”

 

Source: The Real Deal