With retailers today deriving large portions of their business from the internet and looking for ways to cut costs, many tenants are beginning to migrate away from expensive main streets into properties that previously were reserved for industrial uses.
Brokers and developers who see this trend say the most likely retailers to make the shift are destination-type experiences, which don’t rely on foot traffic, and sellers of products that need large showrooms and inventory spaces.
South Florida’s condo market has slowed down and the housing market is not what it once was, but the industrial sector is as hot as ever.
Investment in South Florida’s industrial real estate market rose 77 percent to $1 billion in the third quarter of 2019 on a yearly basis. The market is booming right now due to an influx of institutional buyers acquiring new properties and land, according to an analysis of Real Capital Analytics data by Avison Young.
Those perishable pharmaceuticals, fresh holiday flowers and frozen Thanksgiving turkeys are getting some new places to roost.
In the next few years, more than 400,000 square feet of cold storage is coming to South Florida. That’s still far less than the 1.5 million total square-footage of industrial warehouse space in the pipeline, according to the CBRE Group.
