This October in New York City, SIOR, in partnership with the MIT Center of Real Estate, will be offering a program called New Industries and the Spaces They Occupy. In preparation, two members of the Tech Committee, Gary Schacker and Jim Klein; and Steve Weikal, Head of Industry Relations from the MIT Center had an advanced tour of the largest, Innovation-Anchored real estate developments in New York – Industry City and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Very special thanks goes out to Michael and Bill O’Brien, Brooklyn natives and second generation SIORs, who organized and joined us on the tours.

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We’ve been examining some of the larger ecommerce distribution companies and while it is a very notable trend in the industry, we’re finding the current leasing impact is substantially less than the publicity it currently garners. But this is still early in the migration to a new distribution platform and a lack of building supply is holding back ecommerce adoption especially in infill markets. Ecommerce users generally want a lot of loading, high clearances, and large employee parking lots. These are not buildings typically found on the market and in this period of extreme shortage, there is no incentive for developers to develop anything “out of the box”. However, those few developers who have been willing to take the risk and build ecommerce buildings on spec have been richly rewarded.
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