


Industrial Space Market Premium
Industrial building rents are surging. Largest and fastest increases I’ve ever seen. We are almost at the point where rents and sale prices have doubled since the start of Covid. If rents were quoted daily, there would be the same large spikes you see in oil or wheat markets. Because industrial building market data is opaque, only those buyers (and brokers) most in tune with the industrial market read it accurately. Tenants are paying premium prices to obtain space under constrained conditions.
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Dublin – July 13th to 15th, 2022

New Asian Cities
Through my attendance at MIT’s World Real Estate Forum, I was introduced to new research that is collected in the book entitled, Toward Urban Economic Vibrancy, Patterns and Practice in Asia’s New Cities, Edited by Siqi Zheng and Zhengzhen Tan. The several papers that make up the book include sections on finance, structure, Public Private Partnership, design, success measurements, industrial policy, location, and case studies.
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What I Learned From Attending MIT’s World Real Estate Forum 2020
This year’s Forum was held virtually with presenters and participants from Asia, Europe, and the United States. There were a wide range of future-focused topics that came at the right time. The Forum opened many new doors for exploration and research. My favorite sessions addressed ESG, Wellness, New Cities, Pricing Metrics, and Virtual Worlds.
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Machine Learning and Industrial Real Estate
Most of us have experience with basic spreadsheet packages, databases, and CRMs like Excel, Access, or Salesforce. These are common examples of machine learning. More complicated are the advanced expressions that computer scientists write for high finance trading. All rely on search, update, replace, and other basic commands. By setting up procedures and calculations that process your property information, you too can start gaining valuable machine knowledge to make more deals. We’ll be discussing more about this in person during the TransACT 360 Tech Committee’s Program, “Collaborative Innovation”, on April 30 in Indian Wells, Calif.

Creative Industrial: The Next Wave of Building Investment
We’ve come to end a long period of consolidation in the warehouse and distribution sector. Particularly over the past ten years, a handful of national owners have rolled-up a vast network of separately owned warehouses into an industrial building behemoth across the best locations. It’s a feat worthy of acknowledgement but consolidation marks a turning point. The buccaneering ethos of deal-making has been permanently replaced by a staid, institutional mindset. There is a final hurrah for Private Investors and that is Creative Industrial.
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Industrial Buildings: From Private Hands to Institutional Buyers
One of the longest running trends in industrial real estate is the shift of ownership from private hands to institutions. Traditionally, insurance companies, pension funds, and real estate investment trusts (REITs) would purchase new developments and industrial parks after they had been leased and stabilized. It served as both a guaranteed exit for entrepreneurial developers as well as the way investors would acquire property to match long term obligations.
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Geodata, MappSnap and Industrial Real Estate
Geodata is widely used in many commercial internet applications like Yelp, Google Maps, Twitter, Foursquare and Factual. Many of these web services match your phone’s location to their own mapping programs. In most cases location data is an aid to sell goods and services. I use the same relationship between point data and the connected internet to find more real estate deals using MappSnap.

European Opportunities for U.S Occupiers and Investors
I just returned from the SIOR European Conference in Warsaw, Poland. It’s my third visit to Europe recently and the most persistent trend is the expansion of big warehouse development. It’s leading to opportunities for U.S. occupiers and investors mainly due to the strength of the dollar.
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