GSCW chat recap: JLL’s Bjorson on creative approaches to industrial real estate

“We’ve seen the reallocation of the supply chain and when you relocate to inventory when you want it, it involves reshoring.”


This fireside chat recap is from Day 2 of FreightWaves’ Global Supply Chain Week. Day 2 focuses on retail, building and construction. 

FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: Just-in-time versus just-in-case inventory management

DETAILS: We’ve all heard the saying that real estate is all about location, location, location, but is that the maxim for commercial real estate? Often access to labor and logistics are much more important than proximity to distribution centers and brick-and-mortar stores. Once you understand this, then the type of property becomes less important.

SPEAKER and INTERVIEWER: Kris Bjorson, executive brokerage director, JLL, and Kevin Hill, executive publisher, FreightWaves

BIO: Bjorson is responsible for the development and management of the retail/e-commerce distribution group and a member of the Global Industrial and Retail Boards for JLL. With a focus on maximizing business results for corporations, he also co-founded the Supply Chain & Logistics Solutions practice, which integrates supply chain strategy through industrial real estate implementation. His leadership skills and unparalleled knowledge of the real estate, logistics and retail industries continues to be a valuable asset in exceeding clients’ expectations. Over his 27-year career, Bjorson has completed more than $12 billion of industrial real estate transactions.

“E-commerce drives something like 30% to 50% of the demand for industrial real estate. COVID helped jump that trend three to five years.”

“B-to-B is just getting started in this last-mile world so they are looking at places that would be more traditional. We’re agnostic about what the solution might be. That solution might be a classic manufacturing building that we demo, it could be a vacated retail store, it could be a former single-story office. As all the other worlds are changing around the industrial real estate world, we’re taking advantage of what’s happening in those sectors and trying to make it viable last-mile real estate.”

“We believe there are 1 billion square feet of industrial deals coming in the next five years. They won’t all be done through industrial zoned locations. You’re going to have to be creative.”

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John Kingston

John has an almost 40-year career covering commodities, most of the time at S&P Global Platts. He created the Dated Brent benchmark, now the world’s most important crude oil marker. He was Director of Oil, Director of News, the editor in chief of Platts Oilgram News and the “talking head” for Platts on numerous media outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and Canada’s BNN. He covered metals before joining Platts and then spent a year running Platts’ metals business as well. He was awarded the International Association of Energy Economics Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2015. In 2010, he won two Corporate Achievement Awards from McGraw-Hill, an extremely rare accomplishment, one for steering coverage of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and the other for the launch of a public affairs television show, Platts Energy Week.