Michael Weishaar, senior vice president and principal in the Indianapolis office of Cassidy Turley, specializes in industrial. And he’s glade he does; he’s seeing steady improvements in this market in Indiana’s capital city.
The industrial market is so strong, that speculative building has returned to it, Weishaar said. He said that the Indianapolis-area industrial market has seen more spec development during the last six to nine months than it had in the previous three years.
“Indianapolis is fortunate to have developers who are either based out of this city or who have close ties to it,” Weishaar said. “When they saw the downturn several years back, they played it smart. They did not overbuild. They created a situation in which they able to build spec because the inventory is down.”
According to Weishaar, the industrial vacancy rate in the Indianapolis market stood at 3.3 percent at the end of last year.
“With the vacancy rate there, it kind of screams that you need to be doing some spec development,” Weishaar said.
At the end of last year, five industrial buildings were either under construction or soon-to-be-finished. The buidings, when all are completed, will bring 3.2 million square feet of new industrial space to the market.
What makes the Indianapolis area an attractive one for industrial projects? Weishaar says that the easy answer is location: Indianapolis sits in the middle of the country, putting it in close proximity to most of the country’s population.
