Industrial Development
Last month, Cushman & Wakefield reported that U.S. industrial markets absorbed 63.6 million square feet (5.9 million sq m) of space in the final quarter of 2016, which propelled net absorption for the year to a record-setting 282.9 million square feet (26.3 million sq m). According to the company, the U.S. industrial vacancy rate for all product types continued to decline in the fourth quarter, falling 30 basis points (bps) from the prior quarter and 100 bps from the prior year to 5.5 percent.
A ULI Advisory Services panel will visit the city of Georgetown and Georgetown County to advise representatives on how best to transform a 150-acre (61 ha) site into a catalyst for economic development.
FutureBuild 2016, hosted in January by ULI Los Angeles in partnership with VerdeXchange, offered a look at urban growth challenges in Los Angeles that are illustrative of issues faced by cities everywhere as they aspire to become more livable, prosperous, and sustainable.
Over the next decade, 20 markets worldwide—including south Florida; Santiago, Chile; El Bajío, Mexico; and Philadelphia—are set to emerge as global logistics hubs, according to a new report from CBRE Group Inc.
Advanced manufacturing, which uses high levels of technology in addition to innovative materials and processes, is replacing traditional production in many locations and creating new industrial centers in others. A panel at ULI’s Fall Meeting addressed the changes in manufacturing and how they will affect urban centers.
With e-commerce activity increasing, the real estate market is scrambling to keep up with a new type of building demand that combines distribution centers with fulfillment centers, said experts speaking at the ULI Spring Meeting.
Global e-commerce titans, such as Google and Amazon and China’s Alibaba, are transforming customer expectations on product selection, convenience, and shopping experiences, which may lead to less demand for traditional retail real estate, Jim Tompkins, CEO of Tompkins International, told attendees at ULI’s Midwinter Meeting in Paris last week.
Extracting oil and natural gas from shale is just one driver of the state’s latest glory days.
Who would have thought that the revitalization of Detroit would include high-end watch manufacturing and the revival of a century-old shoe polish brand?
E-commerce has been the fastest-growing segment of the retail market for the last four years and can be expected to be a large share of the market for the next 15 to 20 years. Fulfillment centers have become the new face of industrial warehouse development, according to panelists at the ULI Fall Meeting in Chicago.
Resources that drove the old industrial economy—a central location and access to power—plus available industrial space, give Chicago an edge in the data center business.
Traditional industries, including energy and autos, are making a comeback in the United States. Their resurgence may present new opportunities for real estate investment.
The hydraulic fracturing of rocks is a way to extract natural gas from far below the ground. It has strong economic and land use implications, especially in the West, where the process is fairly new, but it is not without controversy.
What does economic recovery mean for the industrial and office sectors?
A sustainably designed, adaptive-use, urban food factory in Portland, Oregon, helps a neighborhood suffering urban decay, foreclosures, and job losses.
As the balance sheets of corporate America are getting stronger and companies that can lease or buy are trading up to Class A industrial properties, the Class B and C buildings have to be rehabilitated to compete and to provide faster delivery. Hear from experts about a number of Southern California projects that transformed industrial properties.
U.S. East Coast and Gulf ports are upgrading facilities in anticipation of supersized ships transiting the Panama Canal in 2014, while some smaller port cities are strategically positioned to fight for their share of the new business.
The government’s data center consolidation efforts, cloud computing initiative, and budget constraints are creating opportunities for private data centers, attendees at one Bisnow Media event learned.
In its transition from an industrial economy to a knowledge-based one, Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has become the most robust innovation-based cluster in the nation—if not the world.
Medical clusters—health and life sciences clusters that include hospitals, universities, research institutions, and life science companies—can be a boon for communities, such as Lake Nona in Florida.
At ULI’s 2011 Fall Meeting in Los Angeles late last month, a panel of experts shared their thoughts on emerging real estate trends, leadership in a global real estate marketplace, and what they see for the future of the real estate industry. Read more to learn why global business strategies and an ever-changing real estate and business marketplace demand a new breed of real estate leaders.
The enormous volume of traffic at Los Angeles’s two major ports has made the city America’s trade capital. Over the past few decades, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have propelled southern California’s rise as a regional trade giant. Learn what is fundamentally changing the landscape regarding industrial property, as well as the region’s position as an import-based economy.
One of the top U.S. priorities is the need to address infrastructure challenges. Decades of underfunding and limited investment have rendered diverse systems of transportation, energy, water, logistics, and communication inadequate for sustaining economic growth and serving an expanding population. Read about new financing strategies required to attract infrastructure investment now and in the future.
Before the economy crashed, commercial property owners thought long and hard about retrofitting their properties for efficiency and environmental reasons. But today, survival has become building owners’ overriding goal, with deep-diving retrofits slipping down—or off—the list of priorities. Read more to learn when industry analysts expect once again to see a major spike in the retrofitting trend.
With a weak dollar boosting global demand for U.S. exports and the domestic economy inching back from the brink, the health of most U.S. industrial real estate markets is improving, too. Nonetheless, the national vacancy rate remains stubbornly in double-digit territory at 10.2 percent. Read what advice experts at Cushman & Wakefield and other firms have for savvy landlords with vacancies to fill.
As the number of U.S. factory jobs continues to shrink, cities increasingly find themselves with underused or abandoned industrial land. Where these sites border residential areas, the result is blight and increased crime. Read how the Oakland, California, housing authority took aging public housing on a blighted site and remade it to strengthen connections to nearby residences and community amenities.
As cities both large and small transition from manufacturing-based to service-oriented economies, municipal officials are forced to decide whether a site will be prepped for resale to another industrial user or if it should be remediated for residential development and commercial business. Read more to learn what a ULI panel told the city of Indianapolis to do with a well-sited vacant GM property.
It is the way that cities celebrate and showcase assets such as parks, culture and the arts, and safe neighborhoods that will determine the vibrancy of a community. Those communities that build partnerships to shape their response to these changes will be those that become successful 21st-century cities. Learn the three assumptions that successful cities will build on.
The global industrial market is poised for big changes as companies reexamine their supply chain operations, says ULI trustee James J. Curtis III. Labor arbitrage, rising manufacturing costs, and a much greater sensitivity to sustainability are among those factors that will drive the industrial market in the future, he adds. Read what other experts predict for the industrial market going forward.
The April/May Federal Reserve senior loan officer opinion survey notes that both credit standards and loan terms to commercial and industrial (C & I) borrowers continued to ease with the percentage of domestic banks tightening C & I lending standards continuing to moderate (with fewer banks reporting tightening standards). Are commercial banks showing an increasing willingness to extend credit to both small and large business and household borrowers?
