Investor Watch: January 13, 2022

Can’t wait for us to upload the web versions of all the articles in our 208-page January issue? Then jump into the Digital Edition, a screen-based facsimile of our January 2022 print edition complete with messages from supporting advertisers. Catch up on the State of the States, Top Tech Hubs, Mid-Sized Markets, Film & Entertainment, the Site Selectors Survey and much more, including international coverage of Australia, Western Europe and Western Canada. And don’t miss Investment Profiles about 10 different regions of the world. It’s 208 pages of business intelligence you’ll find nowhere else, designed to inform how you approach your own company’s site portfolio and location decision-making.

NAIOP says its new research brief, “How the Other Half Builds: Small-Scale Development in Tertiary Markets,” reveals the reasons that tertiary markets (those with fewer than 2 million people) favor local developers and why smaller industrial markets are attracting more interest from institutional investors. The brief draws from an August 2021 survey of 193 NAIOP members across the U.S. and Canada, and interviews with developers who are active in tertiary markets. Just over half of the U.S. population (51.3%) resides in MSAs that are home to fewer than 2 million people or in areas that are not included in an MSA. Among the brief’s findings:

• Large national tenants have expanded their industrial footprints in many smaller markets, alongside the broader expansion of e-commerce distribution led by Amazon, whose fulfillment center network has brought large distribution centers, and Amazon’s preferred development teams, to several smaller markets.
• Cap rate compression in the largest markets appears to be leading some large investors to look further afield for industrial properties in higher yielding markets.
• Industrial real estate investment trusts (REITs) and investors that have traditionally focused on office properties have become increasingly active in smaller industrial markets.
• Respondents noted two significant advantages to developing smaller buildings in tertiary markets: shorter development approvals timelines as well as shorter acquisition, site preparation and construction schedules.

Site Selection’s annual Top Metros and Top Micropolitans rankings feature communities with a much smaller population threshold that nonetheless hold their own when it comes to corporate project attraction. Watch for the next Top Metros and Top Micros in the March 2022 issue.

In late December, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina M. Raimondo visited the Russell Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Atlanta, Georgia, where she announced the 60 finalists for the U.S. Economic Development Administration’s (EDA) $1 billion Build Back Better Regional Challenge, which provides up to $100 million per grantee to boost economic pandemic recovery and rebuild American communities (visit the link to link to project summaries for all 60 finalists). Raimondo was joined by U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development Alejandra Y. Castillo, who later visited Pittsburgh Yards, an Atlanta-area co-working space. In 2018, the project received a $1.5 million EDA grant to fund infrastructure improvements at the facility, which provides office space, storage, and retail store fronts to small businesses and entrepreneurs. Site Selection profiled the Russell Center in 2017, and we visited Pittsburgh Yards in 2019.

A view from on high takes in the 2022 French EU Presidency decorations at the Justus Lipsius building of the European Council in Brussels earlier this month. France holds the presidency of the Council of the European Union from January 1, 2022, through June 30, 2022. The French government has published a program for that period that features three ambitions: a more sovereign Europe, a humane Europe and a new European model for growth that seeks to “make Europe a land of production, job creation, innovation and technological excellence; in which economic development is aligned with climate goals; that supports innovation and the growth of European digital players and sets its own rules for the digital world; and that offers high-quality, high‑skilled and better-paying jobs.”