JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – It’s more important than most of us realize, and it’s growing in the Jacksonville region.
Warehousing. Warehousing touches so much of what each of us needs or uses every day.
Some of that relates to cost; some of it comes from accessibility and transportation.
“If you buy anything, if you eat anything, if you order anything,” Karen Brune Mathis says. “It probably came through a warehouse somewhere, along the line. And because we are in the southeast, we are in a growth area.”
Mathis is the Editor of Jax Daily Record, a partner with News4JAX. Her reporting brought to light that the area is a huge distribution center with warehouses ranging from very small to over a million square feet.
Luke Pope and Seda Preston join us during our episode of This Week in Jacksonville: Business Edition. Both have roles in real estate. Pope is the executive managing director for JLL (Jones Lang LaSalle). Preston specializes in Industrial Services for Colliers.
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“In order to get a million square feet in Jacksonville, you had to do what we call a build a suit,” Pope says. “You had to have someone build it for you or you built it yourself.”
Most warehousing, before it gets occupied, is built on a speculative nature to attract tenants.
“What we are seeing is that tenants do not give themselves a sufficient amount of time to identify a site and build a building to suit or to have a developer build it to suit them,” Preston says. “Oftentimes, even your large corporate occupiers will oftentimes only give themselves four or six months to identify a new location.”
A timeframe that Preston said is not long enough to build a building.
“So, you have to have [what] we call the mousetrap, right? So ready to go and including office and lighting and then, of course, they can make additional improvements to suit their needs once the lease is signed. But that way they can get in right away. So speed to occupancy is the key,” Preston says.
For all these factors, the warehousing industry is drawing businesses to the area.