GSCW chat: Shortages may push warehouse projects to 2024, JLL executive says

Widespread labor, material shortfalls expected in second half of the year, Bjorsen sayse

Tight warehouse supply through 2022, Bjorsen says.

This fireside chat recap is from Day 2 of FreightWaves’ Global Supply Chain Week

FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC:  How many warehouses do we need?

DETAILS: With warehousing capacity at all-time lows, brokers and developers will be challenged to find space anywhere in the U.S.

SPEAKER: Kris Bjorsen, executive managing director and lead of retail industrial task force at JLL Inc. (NYSE: JLL), a real estate services giant based in Chicago. Bjorsen has worked in the industrial property industry for 27 years.

KEY QUOTES FROM BJORSEN:

“We are seeing unprecedented pre-leasing activity in speculative development projects so they can be finished out in 2022.”

“We will continue to see shortfalls of big-box capacity in the primary markets. This will push people to look for vacancies in second- or third-tier markets.”

“The shortage of labor and materials will come to life in the second half of 2022. We’ve seen it mostly in the first-tier markets. Come the end of this year, we may be short all around. We may be looking at projects being delayed until the end of 2024.”

“Because we will have two more years of the same type of market, we have to be thoughtful of ways to get tenants into space.”

“We have a 3.7% vacancy rate at 14 billion square feet of space. We need to add supply.”

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Mark Solomon

Formerly the Executive Editor at DC Velocity, Mark Solomon joined FreightWaves as Managing Editor of Freight Markets. Solomon began his journalistic career in 1982 at Traffic World magazine, ran his own public relations firm (Media Based Solutions) from 1994 to 2008, and has been at DC Velocity since then. Over the course of his career, Solomon has covered nearly the whole gamut of the transportation and logistics industry, including trucking, railroads, maritime, 3PLs, and regulatory issues. Solomon witnessed and narrated the rise of Amazon and XPO Logistics and the shift of the U.S. Postal Service from a mail-focused service to parcel, as well as the exponential, e-commerce-driven growth of warehouse square footage and omnichannel fulfillment.