New Jersey had quite a bit of small- and
medium-size space available in modern
industrial buildings, built before the economy went slack. Even with a big post-recession comeback at Turnpike Exit 8A, there
is still almost 10% vacancy in the 66-mil-
lion-square-foot submarket. Six to seven
million square feet of that might be divisible for smaller users. Belfer says a number
of start-up e-tailers, some very new—that
is, created within the past six months—are
looking in New Jersey at this time. Several
health-and-beauty e-commerce businesses
are also searching, he says.
Fab.com, founded in Manhattan, has
operated a warehouse in Keasbey for
more than a year. Fab bills itself as the
“world’s fastest-growing e-commerce site,”
having started in June 2011 with 175,000
account members and claiming 10 million members by December 2012. This
kind of wildly unpredictable growth
means that e-tailers require “highly
expandable” space, Belfer notes. “These
companies come into the marketplace
looking for 25,000 square feet, expandable to 250,000 square feet.”
Nevertheless, e-tailers may have very
specific requirements in terms of the type
of space and building features they’re
seeking. “They want state-of-the-art, with
minimum 32-foot-clear ceilings, up to 36
feet and even 40 feet,” according to
Belfer. (State-of-the-art is generally considered to be 36 feet, to accommodate
e-tailers’ need for two or three mezzanine
levels that can be dedicated to specific
tasks such as gift-wrapping or handling
returns.) As Jones Lang LaSalle put it in
its recent “Big-Box Outlook,” e-business is
“disrupting physical space and site
requirements” all over the place. In
Northern New Jersey, for instance, brokers say there is currently a serious shortage of big boxes available with 250,000
square feet or more and high ceilings.
And because almost all e-businesses are
labor-intensive operations, they require
more parking than a typical industrial
user. If a big e-tailer moves into an existing modern facility with truck-loading
doors on both sides, it will probably only
use the doors on one side of the building,
and put employees’ cars on the other
side, said JLL’s Kossar. If a company is
developing its own facility, then it may
need extra acreage for parking. Then
again, if the e-tailer is highly automated,
or thinks it might become that way in the
future, maybe not.
CBRE’s Belfer cites a retail industry
prediction that the e-commerce sector
will grow by 61% by the year 2016. “It has
already been climbing consistently every
year, without a plateau,” he says. “It really
is a whole new game for commercial real
estate to try and figure out the patterns
and the plays. Obviously, no one can say
precisely how it will all shake out.”◆
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AdIndex
1 Yardi Systems, Inc.
3 Berkadia
5 Marcus & Millichap
7 Stewart Title
9 Cushman & Wakefield
11 Forest City Enterprises
21 New Jersey Smart Start
22 AJ Jersey
23 Cohn Reznick
24 Colliers International
25 Provident Bank
29 NYC Dept. of IT and Telecommunications
29 SJP Properties
31 Douglas Elliman Real Estate
33 MRI Software
34 Lexington Realty Trust
37 Glimcher Realty Trust
43 Urstadt Biddle Properties, Inc.
45 Simon Property
47 American Realty Capital
49 Brixmor Property Group
50 Cafaro Company
51 Pennsylvania RE Investments
52 Eders
52 CoroNet
53 Phillips Edison Company
55 CCIM
56 American Property Tax
57 Promontory Interfinancial
58 Cassidy Turley
59 Calkain Properties
60 Chase
63 GE Capital
64 RS NJ
65 Oak Grove Capital
67 Wyndham Hotel Group
69 Pyramid Hotel
71 Real Share National Investment
73 Lodging Cinference
CVR 2 Fidelity
CVR 3 National Realty & Development Corp
CVR 4 Cole Real Estate Investments
This advertising index is provided as an additional service. While every attempt has been made to make this index as complete as possible, the accuracy of
all listings cannot be guaranteed.
