Interesting read from JLLRealViews.com, The new trophy buildings of U.S. real estate, on the increasingly global competition for US Industrial real estate...
Move over, iconic Manhattan skyscrapers: warehouses are becoming a big play for global investors, too. It used to be that global investors focused on U.S. real estate investment were only interested in glitzy office towers in just a handful of high profile locations, like Manhattan, Los Angeles or Miami.
Now, those investors – hailing from locations as diverse as the Middle East, Germany, Singapore, China and Canada – are feeling pressure to achieve returns. To find opportunities in a competitive market, they are looking beyond tall towers to the more horizontal planes of the country’s strategic logistics corridors filled with enormous “big box” institutional-quality distribution centers.
Over the last five years, ownership of industrial real estate has been illustrated by a phenomenon of major investors building or aggregating large-scale portfolios across the country instead of taking on buildings one-by-one. Most notably, the 2015 acquisition of the Industrial Income Trust’s (IIT) 58 million-square-foot, $4.55 billion U.S. industrial portfolio made Singapore-based Global Logistics Properties (GLP) the second-largest owner of industrial property in the United States, second only to San Francisco-based Prologis. Additionally, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) and PSP Investments of Canada purchased Exeter’s entire portfolio of industrial assets in December for $3.2 billion, comprising of roughly 58 million square feet.
