By Carole Hawkins, Staff Writer
In industrial real estate, the single ray of light in recent years has been that empty warehouses, distribution and manufacturing centers are starting to fill with tenants.
But meaningful new construction still waits on a far distant horizon, said Peter Anderson, vice president of Patillo Industrial Real Estate, the largest industrial real estate company in North Florida.
“The user demand for new space has just not returned yet,” he said. “We’ve been vigorously active in re-tenanting properties that became vacant during the recession, and we are slowly making progress. But, we’re not at the occupancy levels or the rent levels yet that would sustain speculative construction.”
Since peaking at 12 percent in 2010, industrial property vacancy in Jacksonville has steadily fallen to 9.2 percent, according to CoStar a market research company for commercial real estate. But rents have yet to climb from their recessionary average of $4 per square foot.
Jacksonville has a number of good quality buildings that sat vacant after 2008 and which are finally being absorbed, Anderson said. In 2013 the market also saw a lot of older industrial buildings being purchased and rehabbed.
When demand for new industrial construction does return, four sites at the metro area’s outlying regions stand poised to accept projects.
Cecil Commerce Center on Jacksonville’s Westside and the 2,000-acre Crawford Diamond Industrial Park in Nassau County are ideal for the kind of manufacturing and aerospace mega-projects the state is working to attract, Florida Secretary of Commerce Gray Swoope has said.
Near the Southside’s soon to be finished 9B highway, the Davis family said it will create an employment center consisting of 241 acres for commercial, industrial, office and retail development.
In St. Johns County at the intersection of Interstate 95 and Florida 207, St. Johns Marketplace LLC has said it will develop more than 1 million square feet of commercial and industrial space.