Moving on down the line

Yes, they're flipping Florida condos and paying outlandish prices for downtown Manhattan lofts. But look beyond the headlines -- industrial property is also on a roll.

The sector includes factories and R&D space, but the dominant category is that of warehouse and distribution centers, which encompass more than half of the sector's 10.3 billion square feet. U.S. manufacturing employment may be long past its prime and the demand for new factory space anemic, but imports are surging. Those goods need to be sorted and tracked and shipped from coast to coast.

”转化为进口的大幅增加a dramatic increase in demand for distribution and warehouse space, which more than offsets the decrease in demand for manufacturing space," says Barney Upton, executive vice president and head of global industrial services for Cushman & Wakefield, a New Yorkbased commercial property brokerage and services firm. Demand is especially robust for the new generation of big-box distribution centers, which feature taller clearing heights (allowing more goods to be stacked), more loading docks and more-sophisticated technology systems.

例如，在6月份，基于芝加哥的第一工业现实信托宣布宣布它将为华盛顿杜邦的零售商码头1进口建造一个450,000平方英尺的大型大箱配送设施。码头1，进口家居家具和礼品产品，将使用该设施在太平洋西北，阿拉斯加和加拿大西部的住宿服务。

Although sales of all types of commercial property are up significantly this year, nothing is as hot as the industrial sector. Slightly more than $14 billion of industrial space changed hands during the first half of 2005 -- an 88 percent increase over the same period last year, according to New Yorkbased real estate data provider Real Capital Analytics. That compares with a 64 percent increase in sales volume for apartment buildings, to $33.2 billion; a 48 percent increase for office space, to nearly $43 billion; and a 10 percent increase for retail properties, to almost $21.8 billion.

In a high-profile deal that closed in July, Columbus, Ohiobased CalEast Industrial Investors, a joint venture of the California Public Employees' Retirement System and LaSalle Investment Management, sold 22 million square feet of industrial space, roughly half of a portfolio it began amassing in January 1998. Real estate investment adviser Rreef, part of Deutsche Bank Group's DB Real Estate, paid $1.3 billion for the package of properties. Rreef declines to comment, but Russell Blackwell, CEO of CalEast, says, "We were very satisfied with the price we got."

几年的空缺，停滞不多租金和空间净吸收的基础，工业产业市场的基本面有很大改善（物理占用空间的净变化）。工业部门的低迷于2001年上半年开始，在Dot-Com Bust和衰退开始时。对工业空间的需求并非令人惊讶的是，与工业生产的高相关性 - 通常，生产指数的变化在六个月后的工业空间净吸收的变化之前。根据Northbrook，伊利诺斯基本房地产服务公司Grubb＆Ellis，2001年和2002年的工业产业部门张贴了负净吸收;2003年，数字变得非常略有阳性。

"The industrial market up until recently has been really dour, and in general there wasn't any industrial demand until about four quarters ago," says Laura Stone Mortimer, managing economist at Torto Wheaton Research in Boston.

根据Grubb＆Ellis的说法，该市场在2005年上半年纪录了近9500万平方英尺的净吸收，而去年同期令人印象深刻的4710万平方英尺，上半年仅2400万平方英尺2003年。第二季度末，工业物业国家空置率为8.6％，比2004年第二季度低110个基点，三年的最低水平低。

Rents have only recently begun to show signs of improvement, but in many markets they are nudging up: In the second quarter average asking rents for warehouse distribution space rose 15 cents per square foot over the prior year, to $4.41 on a triple net basis, meaning the tenant pays for such operating costs as real estate taxes, insurance and building maintenance.

As is the case with other property sectors (mostly retail and, to a lesser extent, office), corporations are increasingly opting to lease rather than own many of their warehouse and distribution buildings, preferring to use their capital for their core businesses. A company might lease an existing building or transact a sale-leaseback of a property it owns. The latter allows a corporation to free up capital otherwise invested in the real estate and, typically, lock in lease rates for anywhere from ten to 25 years.

工业资本化率(一个属性的咕咕叫ent income divided by purchase price, a critical measure of investment value) also look attractive relative to those of other property types, even if prices are on the rise. Investors paid an average $66 per square foot during the second quarter, up from $53 a year earlier. Industrial cap rates averaged 7.8 percent during the second quarter of 2005. That's down from 8.3 percent a year earlier but still stronger than comparable values for office buildings, which averaged 7.6 percent; retail assets, which averaged 7.4 percent; and apartment properties, which sold at an average 6.3 percent cap rate.

Institutional investors particularly appreciate the stability of industrial property assets. Says Robert Bach, national director of market analysis for Grubb & Ellis, "Industrial property is the most stable and the least glamorous, but in the past few years, that's what investors of all stripes are looking for."

它通常需要六个月的时间来建造一个仓库;建造办公楼可能需要一年多。与办公楼不同，工业物业通常不需要资本投资进行租户改进，例如升级接线，因为办公楼经常这样做。工业租金通常在三净基础上提供;办公室租约较少。因此，工业产业部门往往比其他商业物业部门更稳定。

现金流的稳定性对使用责任驱动投资的养老基金（2005年7月）的养老基金特别有吸引力，旨在投资其资产以最佳符合预计义务。亚博赞助欧冠9月中旬，第一家工业宣布与加州州立教师退休系统的合作伙伴关系，以购买1201亿美元的216个核心，制度质量的工业物业。“由于它们含有高水平的当前收入，这是对养老基金的一个非常合适的投资，这些投资是养老基金，这些投资专注于负债，”第一届工业总统兼首席执行官迈克尔布伦南说。

“工业产权被认为不那么挥发，”Cushman＆Wakefield的Upton说。“在您的投资组合中与其他财产类型一起具有”工业化类型就像在您的投资组合中债券一样。“

Pension funds, real estate investment trusts and overseas investors have recently been the most active buyers of industrial properties. An unusual number of big deals is helping to drive overall sales volume as well as pricing; many investors are willing to pay a 10 to 15 percent premium for a large package of industrial properties.

Even before its deal with Rreef was completed, CalEast was busy making a new acquisition of its own; the company paid about $830 million for air cargo facilities at 25 airports around the U.S. and in Canada from a joint venture of Aeroterm, of Annapolis, Maryland, and Greenfield Partners, of South Norwalk, Connecticut.

Among the other deals made during the first half of 2005: Dividend Capital Trust, a Denver REIT, purchased for $607.5 million Boston-based Cabot Industrial Value Fund, which owns an 87 percent interest in a fund of 105 industrial buildings (located in 12 markets) valued at $695 million; and New Yorkbased real estate investment manager ING Clarion paid $474 million to acquire 30 properties in Dallas, northern California, Seattle and Portland, Oregon, from CalWest Industrial Properties, a joint venture of CalPERS and Rreef.

Not surprisingly, the most valuable warehouse distribution space is strategically located near transportation hubs. Industry leader ProLogis, for example, is building an 849,000-square-foot facility for Mohawk Industries, a floor coverings manufacturer and distributor, in an industrial park in Fontana, California, located at the intersection of I-10 and I-15, one of the most heavily trafficked interchanges in the state. In McDonough, Georgia, just south of Atlanta, ProLogis leased more than 1 million square feet of distribution space to Home Depot in a development that offers proximity to East Coast transportation route I-75 as well as to rail service. And in the Inland Empire submarket of southern California, the REIT leased more than 882,000 square feet to Solo Cup Co. in ProLogis Park I-210, located near a BNSF Railway Co. facility in San Bernardino and easily accessible to the seaports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the country's busiest.

"A lot of people say, 'Manufacturing is moving to China, so how is it that your industrial properties are even more valuable today?'" notes Walter Rakowich, president of ProLogis. "While the facilities we invest in are hardly ever located next to manufacturing plants, they are located at key transport nodes -- ports, airports, major highway intersections -- close to major population bases and near the consumer."

And despite the secular decline of U.S. manufacturing and the swollen trade deficit, exports and imports are on the rise. In the first half of this year, exports totaled $443 billion, up from $399 billion in the first half of 2004. During the same period imports reached $809 billion, up from $707 billion in the 2004 period. Last year imports added up to $1.5 trillion and exports to $819 billion.

In addition, notes economist Catherine Mann, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics in Washington, an increasing amount of cross-border trade involves "round trips of so-called intermediate products." She explains: "Think of it as a computer chip goes overseas, gets put on a motherboard, comes back here and gets combined with another product in the U.S. Then it gets shipped out again as an export. All of this round-tripping augments the role for warehousing and distribution."

虽然强劲的净吸收率表明，自2004年初越来越多的新工业空间以来，对工业空间的需求保持在供应领先期。2005年第二季度，正在建设中有8700万平方英尺。在2000年第四季度和2002年第四季度的高度近12200万平方英尺的比较比较。在2002年的最后一个季度的距离为5.2亿平方英尺。在建设中绝大多数空间是投机 - 这是该部门的常态 -- 一些观察家警告说，它可能会开始租赁增长。

“对工业空间的需求很好 - 并非如此，而是好的，”达拉斯的工业产权集团达拉斯负责人James Hendricks说。“发展已经升起，可能很多人都会被人们支付完成的房产，一旦他们起来并租赁。我认为这不是一个惊人的水平，但它当然是在竞争水平。”