Cassidy Turley had plenty of good news for the Cincinnati region in its recently released third-quarter Cincinnati market snapshot. According to the report, the overall vacancy rate of 5.55 percent in the industrial sector remains at a near-record low level.
The report also found that year-to-date office investment sales have already surpassed the total number of these sales for 2012 and 2013 combined.
Industrial absorption at the end of the third quarter totaled 4.36 million square feet. That puts the market on-pace with the 4.54 million square feet absorbed from the same period one year earlier.
According to Cassidy Turley, 11 industrial investment sales of $1 million or more took place across the Cincinnati market in the third quarter.
“The Greater Cincinnati industrial sector has now experienced 13 consecutive quarters of positive net absorption,” said Jarrett Hicks, senior research analyst in Cassidy Turley’s Cincinnati and Dayton offices, in a written statement. “Full-year 2014 net absorption will meet or exceed the 5 million square feet reached in 2013.”
In the office sector, 101,606 square feet was positively absorbed during the third quarter of 2014. This brought the overall vacancy rate in this sector down 22 basis points from the end of the second quarter. The current office market vacancy is 22.36 percent, still too high but steadily coming down.
In more good news for the industrial sector, Cassidy Turley reported that eight projects totaling more than 900,000 square feet were delivered across the Cincinnati market in the third quarter, including a 649,119-square-foot speculative, modern bulk warehouse in Monroe, Ohio. Net absorption for the quarter was 778,433 square feet.
Cassidy Turley officials predicted that another round of speculative industrial construction should begin in the Cincinnati market in the middle of 2015.