Tag Archive for: warehouse space demand

South Florida Industrial Asking Rents Climb In The Third Quarter

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South Florida industrial landlords are still in feast mode.

In the third quarter, Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties’ median asking rents rose 14 percent, 16 percent and 18 percent, respectively, compared to the same period of last year, according to a recent JLL report.

Rising rents in South Florida’s industrial market are a continuing trend. Available warehouse space was at a premium in the third quarter, because vacancy rates in the three counties hovered below 4 percent, JLL found. New projects will add roughly 12 million square feet of industrial space by the end of the year, according to the report, but construction is slowing as a result of economic volatility.

“Current development delivery timelines have been delayed, as market sentiment has shifted to a more conservative approach,” the report states. “Insurance premiums have impacted every level of real estate, making investors and tenants alike more mindful of costs associated with underwriting, development, sales and leasing.”

Miami-Dade County

In the third quarter, the median asking rent in Miami-Dade County jumped to $16.80 a square foot compared to $14.35 a square foot during the same period of last year, the report shows. Landlords have the advantage, as the vacancy rate hit 1.6 percent during the third quarter, sustaining a year-long trend. During the same period in 2022, Miami-Dade’s vacancy rate was 1.8 percent.

The county’s industrial market had a net absorption of 4.1 million square feet in the third quarter, compared to 3.4 million square feet absorbed during the same period of last year. New projects representing 8 million square feet of industrial space were under construction in the third quarter, the report shows.

Among new projects is the proposed Sycamore Logistics Center in Medley. In August, Blackstone, and its subsidiary Link Logistics, broke ground on the two-warehouse complex after landing a $51 million construction loan from Boston-based AEW Capital Management.

Frito Lay signed the biggest lease in the third quarter for 130,320 square feet at Bridge Point Doral, a 175-acre warehouse campus developed by Chicago-based Bridge Industrial, according to JLL.

Broward County

The asking median rent increased to $15.43 per square foot in the third quarter, compared to $12.89 per square foot during the same period of last year, the report shows. Broward landlords also benefited from a low vacancy rate that has remained steady, year-over-year. The vacancy rate was 3.4 percent in the third quarter, compared to 3.3 percent during the same period of last year, the report states.

In the third quarter, net absorption dipped to 172,000 square feet, compared to 2 million square feet absorbed during the same period of last year. Developers are currently building 1.5 million square feet of new industrial space in Broward, the report shows.

Link Logistics was also active in Broward during the third quarter, paying $162 million for a seven-building campus in Deerfield Beach in July. The purchase represented a “notable sale” during the third quarter for Broward’s industrial market, the report states. New York-based Sterling Investors also targeted Broward, acquiring a fully leased warehouse in Pompano Beach for $24.3 million.

Palm Beach County

During the third quarter, the median asking rent increased to $14.48 a square foot, compared to $11.84 a square foot during the same period of last year, the report shows. The 18 percent price jump was the biggest of all three counties. The vacancy rate slightly rose to 3.8 percent in the third quarter, compared to 3.1 percent during the same period of last year.

Net absorption was 412,000 square feet in the third quarter, compared to 580,000 square feet absorbed during the same period of last year. Yet, the development pipeline will add 2 million square feet of new industrial space by the end of the year, the report states.

New buildings to land tenants include 7th Avenue Logistics, a 76,000-square-foot warehouse at 1939 Seventh Avenue in Lake Worth developed by Coconut Creek-based Butters Group. Foundation Building Materials signed a lease for 50,000 square feet at 7th Avenue Logistics, the report states.

 

Source: The Real Deal

Cold Storage And E-Commerce, But Not Amazon, Sustaining South Florida’s Industrial Boom

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For most of the last few years, Amazon has been the dominant force in South Florida’s industrial market, but the e-commerce giant’s recent pullback hasn’t had a negative impact on the region’s warehouse market, industry insiders said at Bisnow‘s South Florida Industrial Outlook event last week.

“The last few years it has all been Amazon, right? They were making 90% of that e-commerce growth. They were really bailing us out of all that space we could not lease,” Bridge Industrial Vice President Aaron Hirschl said at the event. “Now it’s everybody else playing catch-up. It is 85% of all the e-commerce deals are other groups other than Amazon. It’s really good to see that positive growth there.”

The vacancy rate for South Florida industrial properties dropped to 1.8% in the third quarter, according to JLL research. Rents have grown 60% year-over-year, to an all-time record of $14.35 per SF. Construction is speeding up as a result: So far in 2022, approximately 2.3M SF of new product has been delivered. Over the next 18 months, JLL projects deliveries to hit 7.8M SF.

“Much of that is still fueled by e-commerce, even in the absence of the industry’s leader,” Prologis Vice President Jason Tenenbaum said at the event, held at the GalleryOne Fort Lauderdale by Hilton. “I’d say e-commerce continues to be the predominant player, I am guessing in the majority of our portfolios, and that’s notable particularly because of Amazon’s specific slowdown this year,” he said. “I would say the vast majority of our work is centered around that space.”

Tenenbaum said that he expects more leasing in the e-commerce space to come from third-party logistics companies as retailers themselves look to outsource their distribution. Those companies, called 3PLs, have accounted for more than 35% of all warehouse leasing in South Florida so far this year, according to a just published CBRE report.

“I think as pricing and rents continue to rise and supply is constrained, you will see a lot more of all of our clients electing to 3PL their supply chain,” Tenenbaum said.

After e-commerce, the biggest driver of demand in the industrial market is in the food and beverage industry and their need for cold storage, developers at the event said. The global cold storage market was over $9.6B last year and is projected to reach $11.3B this year and hit $25.4B by 2027, according to an October market report by Reportlinker.

“If you look at where the demand is the most nationally, clearly cold storage will be it,” BBX Logistics Properties Mark Levy said. “In South Florida, if you look at the footprint of the market as a percentage of the total base, it’s a very, very small amount of cold storage space product that has been delivered.”

Tenenbaum said that the tourism industry in particular has been active in looking for cold storage properties, a piece of the market that had been largely absent for the previous two to three years.

“There was a time in the last 24 to 36 months where the tourism activity was way down. Now it’s back at a high pre-pandemic levels,” Tenenbaum said. “As tourism has come back and the cruise ships are set to sail again, that’s a really active space.”

Levy said that while the cold storage market is “still tremendously undersupplied,” building the space on a speculative basis is still a rarity. But Bridge Industrial launched a spec cold storage warehouse in Hialeah last year, and signed FreezePak to a 312K SF lease in March.

“I remember when Bridge was working on that development and we thought ‘Those guys are crazy! There is no way that they are going to get those rents,’” Hirschl said. “And sure enough, they leased it out and knocked it out of the park. They proved a thesis and it was really cool to see it happen.”

Kroger, the largest grocery chain in the country, doesn’t have a supermarket in South Florida, but it opened a 60K SF warehouse in Opa-Locka this year to start delivering groceries directly to customers’ homes. Kroger said in its September earnings report that its delivery sales grew by 34% from the previous year.

“Kroger does not have any grocery stores here but they are renting near people’s homes,” Hirschl said. “That trend is really interesting to see if they can really penetrate the market here.”

Butters Construction & Development Director of Acquisitions Adam Vaisman said on a panel that, in addition to e-commerce and food and beverage companies, manufacturing is an increasing presence in the market. He said his firm signed a 200K SF lease with a manufacturing firm in Broward County and was getting ready to break ground.

“You will definitely see more of the manufacturing jobs, especially given our labor pool here in South Florida,” Vaisman said. “We are definitely starting to see that and I think that trend is starting to pick up if you continue to have global instability the way we do.”

But while manufacturers and cold storage providers largely need specialized space, e-commerce users are taking any space they can get in a market with soaring rents and sub-2% vacancy.

“Location is the most important always, so for e-commerce users, if they can’t find a new building and it’s a market they need to be in, they will make it work with a Class-B space or a Class-C space,” said Seagis Property Group Vice President of Florida Acquisitions and Leasing Bradlee Lord. “Public transportation will only get increasingly worse as the population grows. With Covid in 2020, the roads were still relatively busy. Location matters as congestion gets worse.”

 

Source: Bisnow

 

Five Developers Seeking Industrial Projects In The Agricultural Reserve In Southwest Palm Beach County

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Five developers filed land use amendments for industrial development in the Agricultural Reserve in southwest Palm Beach County.

All five applications are in response to a county-initiated process to establish a Commerce Future Land Use category in the Agricultural Reserve to allow light industrial projects. The County Commission is set to vote on this in August.

The Agricultural Reserve is traditionally a rural and agricultural area. Most of the development allowed there has been for single-family homes, creating one of the fastest growing neighborhoods in South Florida. Residential developers must set aside land for preservation in the Agricultural Reserve, and industrial developers would be required to do the same.

Five sites in the Agricultural Reserve in Palm Beach County have been proposed for light industrial development.
(MAP CREDIT: JMORTAN PLANNING & LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE)

Amid huge demand for industrial space throughout Palm Beach County, all of the industrial land along Atlantic Avenue just east of State Road 7 has been approved for development and there’s a need for more development to serve the residents, said Lauren McClellan, senior project manager for Palm Beach Gardens-based JMortan Planning & Landscape Architecture, which represents all five land use applications.

“Now that most of that pre-existing industrial land has been entitled, it is apparent that the demand for various types of industrial space (including but not limited to office warehouse, landscape services, cold storage, and last mile distribution) continues to grow,” McClellan said. “If the Board of County Commissioners adopts the Commerce language in August these five applications will become requests for the Commerce Future Land Use designation.”

Gunster attorney Brian Seymour, who represents Fort Lauderdale-based BBX Capital Corp. in the largest application, said it was filed so the company could get a head start on the long process of a land use change amendment so it will already be in the works should the County Commission approve the Commerce designation. He noted that the light industrial category would not permit heavy industrial uses or self-storage facilities, but it would be appropriate for small-bay warehouses, last-mile distribution centers, and cold storage.

David A. Menchof, an associate professor of supply chain and operations management at Florida Atlantic University, authored a letter for BBX stating that building last-mile distribution centers in the Agricultural Reserve would reduce traffic because goods can reach residents there faster without having to be delivered from distribution centers further away.

Here’s a look at the five applications:

  • State Road 7 Business Plaza: BBX Capital has 40 acres at 9863 and 9773 Happy Hollow Road under contract from Suzanne, Diana, and James Mulvehill. The maximum potential would be 600,000 square feet of light industrial space or 315,000 square feet of flex space with office and light industrial.
  • Boynton Land Commerce: The 8471 Boynton Beach Land Trust, led by Peter Patel in Boca Raton, acquired 15 acres at 8421 S. State Road 7 for $8.53 million in 2021. The land use amendment would permit up to 294,030 square feet of light industrial.
  • BC Commerce Center: BC Boynton Industrial LLC, managed by Malcolm Butters of Coconut Creek-based Butters Construction & Development and Jon Channing in Palm Beach Gardens, has 9.3 acres at 8255 Boynton Beach Blvd. under contract from Paul B. Dye, Randall Thorne, Kimberly Tiernan, Martha Ely and Randy T. Ely. The land use amendment would permit up to 181,515 square feet of light industrial.
  • EJKJ Industrial: Fort Lauderdale-based EJKJ Development LLC, managed by Donald M. Allison and Edward Jackson, paid $3.36 million in April for 7.9 acres on the west side of State Road 7, across from Rio Grande Avenue and just south of Atlantic Avenue. The land use change would allow up to 155,444 square feet of light industrial.
  • Morin/Connolly Commerce: Howard C. Morin, the Robert Morin Trust, and Carol A. Connolly are the long-time owners of 3.4 acres at 9819 S. State Road 7, which currently has 4,040 square feet of warehouse and storage space, along with truck parking. The land use change would permit up to 66,843 square feet of light industrial.

The County Commission is also considering a county-initiated land use change to permit apartment projects there.

 

Source: SFBJ

 

Industrial Revolution Continues: ‘Ongoing Boom’ Draws Out Latest Crop Of Newcomers

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It’s rare for a property type to extend a growth cycle beyond a decade. But industrial real estate’s dominance only seems to grow — attracting newcomers while big players scrap for the materials and land they need to keep their projects moving and potential clients happy.

While longtime powerhouses like Prologis and Panattoni plow forward with their own mammoth projects — and Amazon admits that it has too much industrial space on its hands — other companies are making their debut, hoping to seize on some of the continued demand and expanding yields.

Although the industrial market has been on an expansion trajectory for years, there seems to be plenty of room for newcomers.

“It’s no secret why industrial is doing so well, with the e-commerce boom really accelerated by what’s happened in the last couple of years with the pandemic,” said Scannell Properties Director of Development in Southern California Jay Tanjuan. “People were almost forced to order online, and many realized how convenient it was. E-commerce has huge demand, and so there’s the need for warehouse.”

There seems to be widespread consensus that the industrial heyday is far from over.

“We’re in an ongoing industrial real estate boom. We had been in an above-average growth phase pre-pandemic and obviously, the pandemic accelerated that. Post-pandemic, it continues to grow,” said RBC Capital Markets Director Michael Carroll, an analyst who covers Prologis and other REITs. “I don’t think we’re at the end of it, it’s still ongoing.”

Carroll pointed to the nationwide vacancy rate for industrial space — 3.3% in the first quarter, according to Cushman & Wakefield, with lease rates up 15.2% on average compared to a year ago — and a rapid pace of leasing that means new spec development is snapped up as soon as it’s finished, if not before.

Among the industrial newcomers is Peterson Cos., the Virginia-based developer of residential communities, huge retail districts and data centers. Peterson took the plunge into industrial development last year, and has two projects totaling 334 acres underway in the Washington, D.C., area, with another 915 acres in the planning stages, according to Peterson President of Development Taylor Chess.

“We started looking at industrial eight to 10 years ago, seeing that as the wave of the future,” Chess told Bisnow. “We felt as though distribution was going to become a much more integral part of the retail market. But we kept getting beaten out by people buying land for data centers, so we pivoted to data centers.”

Now, as the company’s initial prediction proved out, hastened along by the pandemic, Peterson doubled down on its efforts, launching an industrial arm in earnest to capitalize on the staggering demand.

 

“There’s no question that internet sales and distribution were going to become a key industry eight years ago, and that’s why we started teeing it up. We had no idea it was going to accelerate as fast as it did,” Chess said.

Peterson’s not alone. Nationwide companies that have operated successfully for decades in other property types are also diversifying their efforts by turning to industrial.

South Carolina-based Greystar, for example, is a bastion of multifamily development and management, with thousands of units in major markets across the country. But Greystar in March paid $43.7M for 154 acres near the Phoenix airport, setting up the company’s first large-scale industrial project. Greystar got a leg up on its foray into a new product type by purchasing a parcel with plans that were already approved by the local planning authority. Greystar will work with a development team assembled by the former owner of the land, a Phoenix-based company called Unbound Development, according to a press release announcing the deal.

Similarly, private equity giant KKR & Co. earlier this month announced a dramatic push into industrial development, with plans to build 1.8M SF worth of mid-sized warehouses in last-mile distribution locations in Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, and Orlando, Florida.

And Tishman Speyer, known for its office buildings, hired Andy Burke, formerly of industrial developer Terreno Realty Corp., as its managing director to oversee industrial acquisitions and development. Tishman Speyer in December 2021 announced that it acquired two middle-mile distribution centers in Colorado and Pennsylvania.

Each of these new entrants to the industrial market appears to have a focus on last-mile distribution, which is basically the white whale of industrial development right now, according to Carroll, thanks to its demand paired with a lack of available land.

“Companies are trying to build industrial warehouses close to consumers because it reduces shipping costs and labor costs,” Carroll said. “It’s important to be as close to consumers as you can, but most cities don’t want industrial warehouses because they want the highest value for their tax base and the least traffic. It’s hard to build industrial warehouses where they actually need to be.”

The lack of available land is something about which Chess at Peterson knows a lot.

“This has never been an industrial market, it’s always been a government market,” Chess said of his company’s target market around the nation’s capital. “Zoning is a challenge, as well as finding large tracts of land. Many other areas have large industrial sections of their metro area that have already been designated or are being redeveloped from manufacturing. D.C. doesn’t have that, so finding the right location has been a challenge.”

Land availability is just one of the challenges for any company trying to develop industrial properties right now. Shipping delays and turbulence in markets and foreign countries continue driving up the cost of materials, and labor is difficult to find in most markets. This doesn’t just make buildings cost more, it impacts a key factor for potential industrial tenants: speed to market.

“The biggest issue with leasing is that when tenants enter the market, they want it now. That is the biggest issue. The tenants are there, but we have to finish building to be able to put them in. That’s why going spec is so important,” Chess said.

With so much competition for land, materials and labor, the addition of new players to the marketplace could be considered a negative for existing companies that are already battling to get what they need.  But Tanjuan says that for those who are committed to the product type, there’s a way forward.

“There are opportunities out there for everybody,” Tanjuan said. “It’s competitive, and finding space is extremely difficult, but there are opportunities out there. If you’re out there and being proactive, you’re going to run into something.”

 

Source: Bisnow

Could Higher Gas Prices Have Ripple Effects For Retailers, E-Commerce Leasing In Industrial Market?

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Retailers, third-party logistics firms and e-commerce groups alike are eating up the most big-box warehouse space in today’s red-hot market.

Retailers and wholesalers accounted for the most industrial deals at 200,000 square feet or larger last year, or 35.8% of all leasing activity, a considerable increase from 24.7% in 2020, according to CBRE Group Inc. E-commerce fell from the No. 1 spot in 2020 to third last year, accounting for 10.7% of all deals, while 3PLs grew from 25.8% to 32.2%, ranking No. 2 among large industrial leases in both 2020 and 2021.

Propelled by a surge in online ordering, and changes to consumer preferences in part because of the pandemic, retailers and 3PLs have ramped up their distribution networks considerably in recent years. That demand is expected to be sustained this year, and could become even more frenzied with the recent surge in gas prices.

The cost of regular gas has risen nationally 20.9% in the past month, from an about $3.50 a gallon to $4.32 on Tuesday, according to figures from Heathrow, Florida-based American Automobile Association Inc.

James Breeze, senior director and global head of industrial and logistics research at CBRE, said transportation accounts for at least 50% of a typical industrial occupier’s costs, even before the recent hike in inflation and oil prices. But, largely because of sanctions imposed on Russia from the war in Ukraine, oil prices have risen dramatically, although Brent crude futures — a key benchmark for oil prices — just began to decline. National gas prices were down 0.2% between Monday, March 14 and Tuesday, March 15, according to AAA.

“Any run-up in transportation costs will likely outpace warehouse rent growth, even while that’s growing at a rapid clip, which could result in even more demand for warehouse space,” Breeze said.

Carolyn Salzer, senior research manager of industrial logistics at Cushman & Wakefield PLC said higher gas prices could have a ripple effect on the industrial market, depending on the user and their supply-chain model. Both Salzer and Breeze said real estate costs for warehouse users have typically been about 5% of a company’s costs but, more recently, that’s gotten closer to 10%, Salzer said.

“If you bite the bullet and pay the more expensive rent to be close to the population center, and be more competitive with the labor pool and provide easier options for commuters to get to where you’re located, it can cut your transportation costs on gas and mileage in general,” Salzer continued.

Cushman & Wakefield is forecasting rent growth for warehouse and logistics space will rise by more than 15% in the next two years. Class A and new construction rents are anticipated to grow at an even higher rate. Those rental surges are creating a squeeze for some users, with tenants looking at lease terms sooner than what’s typical, or negotiating an early renewal or a smaller extension to resize a facility or consider real estate farther out, Salzer said.

But, Breeze said, for most industrial users today, higher rental rates generally aren’t causing companies to hit the brakes on expansion because they need the space to store inventory and lower transportation costs.

Salzer said she anticipates e-commerce users will occupy about the same share of the market it has since the pandemic, or 40%. That’s compared to 28.2% of all industrial absorption from 2016 through 2019, according to Cushman. Many retailers are opting to work with 3PLs to bolster their supply chains, which will continue to comprise demand in 2022 and beyond.

“CBRE so far this year has seen ramped-up leasing activity for groups that deal in building and construction materials, as well as medical supplies, which typically represent a lower share of the overall warehouse market, Breeze said. “That’ll likely mean a more diversified occupier base this year.”

 

Source: SFBJ

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South Florida’s Industrial Squeeze Has Brokers Sounding Alarms

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After receiving unsolicited offers to buy its 8.6-acre industrial site in Medley last year, KDD Properties decided to list it and see how many institutional investors would line up with competitive bids.

“There were no less than 25 offers from various public and private pension funds and institutional investors,” Sky Groden of JLL, which marketed the property, told The Real Deal. “The deal ended up transacting at 25 percent higher than the unsolicited offers.”

Prologis, the behemoth industrial developer that dropped $43 million to acquire 29 acres of industrial properties in areas close to Miami International Airport last year, placed the winning bid. In December, the firm closed on the Medley property, which consists of a fully leased, 43,700-square-foot building and 5.5 acres of trailer truck parking.

“More and more, industrial developers and institutional investors are looking at truck stops and construction equipment yards, like the Medley site, that offer vacant land that can be developed,” Groden said.

With a limited number of big industrial properties for sale across South Florida, even major players are turning to smaller buildings on large parcels. There’s a rush to wheel and deal for any existing warehouse properties as the sector continues to outperform all others, commercial real estate experts say.

 

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The South Florida Answer To West Coast Logistic Bottlenecks

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South Florida’s industrial market fundamentals, particularly for bulk warehouse space, blew through the third quarter of 2021 on strong leasing demand and new construction

The region’s healthy consumer market and growing population helped push investor and occupier confidence in the industrial market, which is likely to continue through 2022.

The backlog at West Coast ports is causing weeks of delays for goods that need  to travel to East Coast markets, making warehouse/distribution space in South Florida an attractive and faster alternative from a distribution standpoint. Bottlenecks in the supply chain are realigning how many firms view real estate needs locally with a shift in philosophy for inventory management.

Previously, companies focused on lean supply chains where materials and goods arrive “just in time.” In a market like South Florida, that meant limited amounts of warehouse space were needed.  Now, companies are turning to an inventory strategy that follows a “just in case” model, where more goods are stored closer to customers to minimize fluctuations in demand. South Florida, with three deep-water ports, has the capacity to address the immediate logistics needs for companies with changing inventory strategies.

In the last year, 18,200 new industrial and warehouse-related jobs were created in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties. They were added because of big-box expansion by e-commerce firms, together with a push into last-mile facilities. Hiring also occurred with traditional retailers, plus new-to-market entrants, which increasingly viewed the tri-county as a strategic location to serve the immediate needs of customers.

New inventory and aggressive development captured some of the new employment. In the first nine months of 2021, 5.4 million square feet of new industrial space was delivered in the region. As the industrial inventory and deliveries grew, so did the occupiers’ space requirements for square footage, but new construction could not keep up.

As of the end of the third quarter, 6.6 million square feet of industrial space was under construction, with three projects representing 1.8 million square feet of new inventory. Still, overall industrial vacancy in South Florida fell to 4.4 percent in the third quarter. Both Miami-Dade and Palm Beach County were even tighter at 3.3 percent, with Broward County coming in at 5.9 percent as available space throughout the region decreased year-over-year.

While not a record-setting year yet, new leasing activity year-to-date of 11.6 million square feet was only 18 percent less than the full amount for all deals done in 2019. Net absorption, or the amount of space absorbed by tenants, was 7.8 million square feet in 2021. That represents a 250 percent increase in the amount of space absorbed when compared to 2020.

yc37i south florida industrial absorption The South Florida Answer to West Coast Logistic Bottlenecks

In Miami-Dade, leasing reached more than 6.8 million square feet year-to-date, an increase of 15.5 percent compared to the same period one year ago. For that same period, Broward County recorded more than 3.6 million square feet, a 36.1 percent rise from 2020. Palm Beach County had 1.0 million square feet in new leasing activity so far in 2021.

Limited availability on heightened demand allowed landlords to push asking rates to all-time highs. Overall average asking rents for all South Florida were at $9.87 per square feet, triple net, the highest amount recorded. Rents in Miami-Dade were at $9.17 per square foot, a 7.1 percent jump from last year. And Broward County also reached an all-time high of $10.27 per square foot in the third quarter. Palm Beach County topped out at $11.07 per square foot with the asking rate rising steadily over the last three quarters as construction picked up.

AfGHE south florida industrial rents e1637699131823 The South Florida Answer to West Coast Logistic Bottlenecks

Confidence in South Florida’s economy and potential for growth will only be enhanced by the lifting of U.S. restrictions on foreign travel. The influx of travelers and investors from overseas, starting over the holidays, will contribute to additional optimism in industrial market fundamentals in the region. The longer that challenges remain at West Coast ports to efficiently move goods into the United States means that South Florida becomes the better, more reliable strategic alternative for companies. The region’s positive fundamentals post pandemic,including solid population growth and rising incomes, make South Florida an attractive market for investment.

 

Source: Commercial Observer

 

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Investors ‘Back With A Vengeance’ As Warehouse Demand Surges

As shopping centre and high street landlords survey the wreckage left by coronavirus, warehouse owners are facing a different problem: how to deal with record demand.

The pandemic has pushed more consumers online, prompting a rush for warehouse space, from small “last-mile” delivery sites near city centres to cavernous “big-box” distribution centres

Amazon has led the charge. The company, which has added an eye-watering $600bn to its market capitalisation this year as sales have jumped, is inking lease agreements on mammoth warehouses around the world. It has committed to opening 33 “fulfilment centres” in the US this year, an additional 35m square feet spread from Atlanta to Arizona.

The US ecommerce giant is also the incoming tenant of a 2.3m square foot warehouse on London’s outskirts, according to people with knowledge of that deal. Amazon’s sprawling expansion is one reason why investors are sensing opportunity.

The take-up of UK logistics space hit record levels in the second quarter of the year, according to property group CBRE — despite the lockdown.

“Following a quiet few months after coronavirus hit, investors are back with a vengeance”, said David Sleath, chief executive of Segro, the dominant logistics company in the UK and a sizeable participant in Europe which last week said it had lifted first-half profit. “If you are a global institutional investor and you want exposure to commercial real estate, this is an attractive place to be.”

A decade ago, ecommerce accounted for 6.7 per cent of all retail sales in the UK, according to the Office for National Statistics. By February, the month before the outbreak, the figure was 19 per cent. By May it had hit 33 per cent. In April, 27 per cent of purchases were made online in the US, according to the commerce department and Bank of America.

Until recently, the most desirable property to own was a traditional mall. Malls had a natural moat, being difficult to develop and serving a catchment area

“That share was likely to diminish as stores reopened,” cautioned Mr Sleath, “but incoming tenants were looking to crystallise that temporary spike into increased capacity”.

“There’s a wall of cash coming into our sector,” said Marcus de Minckwitz, an investment adviser on European logistics at Savills property.

Every extra £1bn spent online means the addition of almost 900,000 square feet of logistics space, according to CBRE. New York-listed Prologis, the world’s largest warehouse company, estimates that 1.2m sq ft of space is needed for every $1bn in ecommerce sales in the US.

Gains from ecommerce tenants far outweigh the losses from bricks-and-mortar retailers, according to CBRE, one reason why Blackstone, the world’s largest private property owner, has described logistics as its “highest conviction” sector.

“Until recently, the most desirable property to own was a traditional mall. Malls had a natural moat, being difficult to develop and serving a catchment area . . . Logistics for a long time was viewed as the other end of the spectrum: not so exciting and more easily replicable,” said Ken Caplan, global co-head of Blackstone Real Estate. The rise of ecommerce had shifted that whole dynamic.”

In June 2010, Segro’s market capitalisation was less than £2bn, according to data from S&P Global. Now at £11.8bn, it is comfortably the UK’s largest listed property group; UK shopping centre owner Intu, meanwhile, has collapsed. The value of US peer Prologis has climbed a fifth this year to roughly $77.5bn.

Dozens of shopping centres in the US are being turned into industrial sites, according to CBRE, which says Covid-19 will accelerate the trend. This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon was in talks with mall owner Simon Property to repurpose department stores as distribution hubs.

Thanks to the ecommerce boom, CBRE predicts there will be demand for 333m sq ft of new space in the US by 2022 — treble its previous estimate — and expects rents to grow by about 6 per cent a year. Amazon is not the only eager tenant. Fashion retailers with a limited online presence have desperately sought space to park stock they could not shift in the pandemic.

“They already have warehouses full of clothes, then next season’s come in and they can’t stack it,” according to one UK property agent.

“But while some warehouse owners had suffered hits to rental income from retail tenants in particular, investors bidding for new sites were achieving few discounts,” said Mr de Minckwitz.

“Some indiscriminate investors were likely to get caught out, warned Mr Sleath. “There will be more retail fatalities, that will mean empty warehousing as well as shopping centres. It’s very important to think about where you place your money.”

Asset manager PGIM bought five German logistics sites last month and said it was optimistic that demand would only grow. Private equity firms are piling in too: as well as Blackstone, Meyer Bergman plans to raise €750m to invest in Europe.

“Investors needing long and strong sources of income, such as sovereign wealth funds and European pension funds, were also attracted by the sector,” said James Dunlop, a fund manager at Tritax Big Box.

“But some might come unstuck,” cautioned Adrian Benedict, head of real estate solutions at Fidelity. “There’s a flood of capital from retail to logistics. Inevitably, with every crisis, you see those poorly considered deals at the end of the cycle are the ones you really regret.”

 

 

Source: SFBJ