Jul
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National CRE News: Demand for Warehouse Space Strongest since 2011

Source: CoStar News
By: Randyl Drummer
Date Posted: July 20, 2016

Prologis, the world’s largest developer and owner of industrial real estate, reported the first six months of 2016 were the strongest in its company’s history as moderate levels of new supply paired with a strong appetite by e-commerce and other companies created the tightest market for tenants since the first internet boom of the early 2000s.

Warehouse

The San Francisco company owns or has interests in 3,347 buildings totaling 666 million square feet of property in 20 countries, including nearly 380 million square feet in the US. As such, the publicly traded REIT serves as a bellwether stock for the global warehouse and logistics market.

The REIT’s same-store net operating income increased 6.1% in the second quarter, securing an average 17.8% rent increase at lease expirations while delivering $621 million in new projects. Prologis had more than $3.7 billion in cash liquidity, its highest on record.

“All in all, the last six months have been the best in our company’s history,” said Hamid Moghadam, chairman and CEO of San Francisco-based Prologis (NYSE:PLD). “E-commerce and supply chain reconfiguration continue as big drivers of demand for our product. The Class A market is where the action is.”

Building Fast, Leasing Faster

CoStar and other CRE services firms, including CBRE Group, Inc. and JLL, noted the increasingly limited availability of U.S. industrial space at midyear as online sellers, third-party logistics firms, food and beverage and consumer goods firms scoop up newly constructed bulk warehouses and other industrial buildings as fast as they are built.

Even though developers added 158 million square feet of new warehouse/distribution space over the past 12 months, the overall vacancy rate for industrial property continued to inch down to 5.5% as of June 30 of this year.

According to a preliminary analysis by CoStar of midyear logistics and industrial property leasing data, that’s nearly 2 percentage points lower than the 2004-2007 expansion cycle, and within a few basis points of the lowest vacancy rate for industrial property since the Internet-driven demand boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

CBRE said it expects the global economy will continue to sustain demand for industrial space.

“While we’ve had some shocks to the global economy, the U.S. economy still is moving along at a slow and steady space and that will sustain industrial demand,” said Jeffrey Havsy, CBRE chief economist for the Americas. “Retail sales have been above expectations, posting pretty strong gains in April and May. That will help both the retail and industrial sectors.”

More than 210.5 million square feet of industrial space was absorbed by tenants over the last year, according to CoStar. The nearly 46.9 million square feet of net absorption in the second quarter, while down just under 10% from a year earlier, remains consistent with the average pace of demand growth throughout the long expansion, said CoStar Senior Real Estate Economist Shaw Lupton, in a preview of the company’s midyear industrial market review and forecast webinar scheduled for July 28.

Link to article: Demand for Warehouse Space Skyrockets