Category: Warehouses (3)

Source: CoStar
By: Diana Bell

Prologis, the country’s largest owner of industrial real estate, is raising its projected earnings for the coming year by more than 2% as it pursues further rent increases and seeks to capitalize on a preference for smaller warehouse developments.

The real estate investment trust, headquartered in San Francisco, said rent growth will be about 4% globally, principally driven by the United States, though Europe is expected to outperform later in the year, Chief Financial Officer Thomas Olinger said Tuesday on a conference call with analysts discussing first-quarter financial results.

Prologis plans to spend $2 billion on starting development and $600 million on acquisitions but seeks to reduce its ownership in open-ended European funds from 28 percent to 24 percent to accommodate “partners and bring ownership in line” with a long-term target of 15% on the continent, Olinger said.

The REIT signaled a focus on smaller-sized warehouse space, with only about 25% of its portfolio comprising big-box regional facilities over 250,000 square feet. About two-thirds are less than 250,000 square feet.

“We are seeing higher rent change on roll under 250,000 square feet versus bigger box, and that spread is accelerating. We are well-positioned to capture that opportunity,” said Olinger.

Chairman Hamid Moghadam doesn’t see weakness in large space demand but said “there are some markets on the periphery like outlying corridors of Chicago where there are a lot of big buildings and market rent is softer now until those buildings get absorbed.”

The executives declined to name locations Prologis is considering, but Moghadam said the REIT is staying out of overdeveloped markets.

“The big boxes got their growth early in the recovery cycle. They are up significantly on 40% to 50% in the past four to five years. Now they are taking a back seat to the medium and smaller spaces,” he said.

The REIT’s strategy this year will be to push rents up. “Don’t be surprised if you see occupancy be a little lower throughout the year,” said Olinger. “We are going to make the right long-term decision, which is going to be pushing rents and extending term.” Prologis expects to end the year with an uptick in occupancy to 97.5%.

As the first developer to build a multistory warehouse in the United States, Prologis has faced headwinds with leasing the three-story, 589,000-square-foot Seattle building known as Prologis Georgetown Crossroads, where it is asking for rents in the range of $1.30 to over $2 a square foot.

Of the Seattle property, Olinger said, “We have done a 100,000-square-foot lease in this asset, and one lesson we’ve learned about this is there is a process that we have to go through with customers. It is a new product in a new location. We need to get a premium and we think we’ll get that premium, but deal gestation periods are long and they will continue to be long until customers are basically more accustomed to this product.”

The REIT said it will pursue opportunities with Seattle-based online retailer Amazon, its largest customer.

“Broadly we are seeing customers like Amazon and other customers focused on e-commerce with some network rollouts involve a combination of large buildings and a series of higher number of smaller buildings that are located close-in to larger population centers, all of which fit really well for our portfolio,” said Olinger.

Moghadam noted the smaller-footprint buildings these types of tenants are favoring offer more options in terms of parcel size and have higher clear heights with more mezzanine floors, which effectively increases space utilization.

Of the 772 million square feet Prologis had within its portfolio as of March 31, 59% was U.S.-based and is expected to generate 77% of the REIT’s net operating income for the year. Prologis has about $97 billion in assets under management.

Some of the largest shippers and household-name companies lease from Prologis, with Amazon in first place contributing to 3.6% of its net effective rent. Amazon leases about 20.7 million square feet. Shippers DHL, UPS and FedEx, retailer Home Depot and automaker BMW all rank within Prologis’ top 10 largest customers. Retail giant Walmart is in 11th place with 4.4 million square feet. And the U.S. government ranks 19th, with just over 1 million square feet.

This year, Prologis expects to complete just under 12.4 million square feet of development activity for properties it will fully own and manage spending $1.1 billion to do so. Roughly half of that development is planned for the Western United States. For 2020 and beyond, so far it has docketed 1.6 million square feet in development solely in the West.

Of the $239 million Prologis spent on development starts globally in the first quarter, just 41.2% is build-to-suit, showing a bulk of speculative industrial work.

Despite recording a decline in net earnings in the first quarter, the REIT saw rental revenues jump year-over-year to $696.8 million compared to $555.9 million. Occupancy was roughly flat at 96.8%, but Prologis leased 43 million square feet in the first quarter, compared to 33 million the in the same quarter a year ago.

The results follow what Moghadam called Prologis’ “strongest year ever” in 2018. The REIT embarked on $3.1 billion in new developments globally totaling 36 million square feet. The year also saw Prologis sell off an 86-property portfolio to MapleTree and acquire Denver-based industrial REIT DCT Industrial.

Link to article: Prologis Sees Opportunity in Smaller Warehouse Footprints

Amazon’s pending purchase of online pharmacy PillPack has the potential to create a need for specialized warehouse space to ship prescription drugs and even lead to small retail clinics, adding demand to an already surging industrial property market.

The move by the online retailer could have significant implications for industrial property sales, which outperformed other major commercial sectors across the U.S. in the second quarter as Amazon and other companies pump up their supply chains for e-commerce delivery, according to CoStar data.

“If you really read between the lines here, and kind of analyze this, Amazon wants to be part of every single transaction that happens in our lives,” said Gregory Healy, senior vice president of chain and logistics at Colliers International.

Amazon, the world’s largest retailer, bought PillPack in late June for an estimated $1 billion. PillPack holds pharmacy licenses in all 50 states and ships medications from its primary drug distribution center in Manchester, NH, to customers who take multiple daily prescriptions. The company is targeting a major market: On its website, PillPack says 40 million adults take more than five prescriptions each day.

If Amazon incorporates PillPack’s approximately 1 million customers into its Prime membership business, which has 100 million subscribers, the company would need drug distribution centers near large cities cleared to handle medicines, said Santo Leo, founder and CEO of MailMyPrescriptions.com in Boca Raton, FL.

Those could be small centers dotted across the country or a handful of larger ones. In either case, they will have to meet far more specialized state and federal requirements because the goods being handled are medicine, Leo said.

Though Amazon already owns or leases about 100 million square feet of distribution space, “you can’t just rip a warehouse out and put a pharmacy there,” said Leo, whose mail-order pharmacy is licensed to dispense prescription drugs in more than 40 states. “You need to design these from scratch. You need more power, more data, more security measures. Traditional big, bulky, automated facilities are just not designed for pharmaceuticals.”

Pharmaceutical warehouses must have processes in place for temperature control, security, documentation and the ability to address product recalls, said Carmine Catizone, executive director of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, which accredits wholesale pharmaceutical warehouses. Each state also has different licensing requirements.

The company may need new buildings for an online pharmacy, the analysts said. Though Amazon is opening fulfillment centers at a dizzying rate — eight so far in 2018 — it has a host of controls to ensure each center operates at maximum capacity and has little extra space, the company said in its 2017 annual report.

Amazon declined to comment on its plans for specialized PillPack warehouse space. Amazon hasn’t made any public statements about its PillPack strategy since shortly after the purchase, which is expected to close by the end of the year.

Amazon’s PillPack purchase follows its joint venture with Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and JPMorgan Chase to improve the U.S. health care system and cut costs. PillPack is part of that strategy, said Leo, who predicted Amazon would move quickly to grow PillPack to place pressure on health-care competitors.

“How do you keep people out of the doctor’s office or hospital lab? Make sure people take their prescriptions,” he said.

Healy said the purchase could have implications for any brick-and-mortar plans Amazon has as well, noting the trend toward small, walk-in clinics across the country. It’s estimated there are now almost 3,000 such clinics, according to Accenture. He also speculated that Amazon could add pharmacy services to its Whole Foods stores.

“It will probably net a greater industrial space for Amazon, but I would think there would be some sort of new retail model,” he said. “There could be something else down the pipeline, perhaps a new form of retail.”

Source: CoStar News
By: Rob Smith
Date: August 2, 2018
Link: Amazon

Source: CoStar
By: Randyl Drummer
Link: Warehouses

Warehouse giant Prologis Inc. is ramping up construction and asset sales following healthy first-quarter results powered by brisk leasing and near-double-digit rent growth in the red-hot logistics market.

Based on robust demand for modern logistics space by e-commerce and other tenants, San Francisco-based Prologis this week raised the value of planned development starts by $200 million to between $2.2 billion and $2.5 billion for 2018. Roughly half the new activity is lower-risk build-to-suit construction, Prologis Chief Financial Officer Tom Olinger told investors.

Prologis (NYSE: PLD), by tradition one of the first equity REITs to report earnings each quarter, also increased its estimate of projected building and land sales by roughly $475 million to between $1.4 billion and $1.7 billion for the year. The sell off will effectively complete the company’s seven-year campaign to dispose of assets deemed “non-strategy” following Prologis’s 2011 merger with AMB Property Corp.

“Market conditions remain extremely healthy and our strategy is set,” Prologis Chairman and CEO Hamid R. Moghadam told investors. “Going forward, it’s all about execution.”

One stock analyst summed it up even more succinctly following the earnings presentation by Prologis, a quarterly bellwether for U.S. and global logistics markets: “Industrial has never been this good.”

John W. Guinee, analyst with Stifel, Nicolaus & Associates, said Prologis’s extraordinary 9.2% first-quarter rent growth, steady demand from Amazon and other tenants and strong development platform “sets the stage for a strong 2018 and 2019.”

Prologis, fueled by the strong earnings report, led all equity REITs with a 4.3% increase in its share price on Wednesday. Industrial REITs again led all property sectors with 1.8% average growth, with Prologis rivals Rexford Industrial Realty, Inc. (NYSE: REXR) and Terrano Realty (NYSE: TRNO) turning up among the top five gaining REIT stocks.

Only a handful of factors could derail the world’s largest industrial REIT from another strong year, including the prospect of a long trade war between the U.S. and China, which could hurt Prologis and its industrial REIT rivals along with the rest of the economy.

“Any kind of trade war is bad for economic growth generally,” Moghadam said in response to an analyst’s question. “If the economy grows at 30 to 40 basis points slower than it would have otherwise, that’s not good for anybody’s business.”

The good news is that talks, including President Donald Trump’s expressed interest in possibly rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, are still in their early stages while announced new tariffs have not yet fully gone into effect, Moghadam said.

“All of our customers that I’m aware of, basically, have their head down doing business, and they’re not paying too much attention to what comes out in the tweets in the morning until there is something specific they can react to,” Moghadam said.

The CEO pointed out that most of the tariffs announced to date have been imposed on raw or intermediate materials, which does not affect Prologis’s main logistics and warehouse business.

“Steel doesn’t go through warehouses, aluminum doesn’t go through warehouses. The simplest way of thinking about it is that while we are concerned by the talk; we are not yet concerned by the action,” Moghadam added.

That said, Prologis is carefully monitoring rising construction costs which some analysts have said could be exacerbated by tariff-related increases in materials prices. In the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, costs are up 20% to 25% over last year, Moghadam said.

“[Construction costs] have been stable for many years and now it’s time for the contractors and buyers to make some hay while the sun is shining,” Moghadam said. “But it’s getting tougher to pencil out spec development in some of these markets, and that’s good news I guess for rental growth over time.”

New tariffs and trade disputes are casting a pall over sentiments across various sectors, even as all 12 regions of the Federal Reserve Bank reported continued robust job growth with few signs of overheating, according to the Beige Book, the Fed’s most recent survey of U.S. businesses.