Industrial users are targeting Kansas City today. This shouldn’t be surprising; the city boasts a great location in the center of the country and a strong system of highways and rail lines.
Because of this, Kansas City’s industrial market is now in the middle of a building boom. Cushman & Wakefield in its latest industrial report, said that in the first quarter of the year, developers delivered 2.4 million square feet of new industrial space to the Kansas City market.
That’s the sign of a desirable industrial market. The addition of the extra space did cause the industrial vacancy rate here to increase, from 7.37 percent to 8.10 percent. But the industrial market did absorb 783,000 square feet of space during the first quarter, according to Cushman & Wakefield.
Michael Mayer, market leader for industrial for the Kansas City office of Cushman & Wakefield, said that the busy Logistics Park Kansas City in Edgerton, Kansas, was the first-quarter star of the local industrial market.
“(The park) is the focal point of industrial development,” Mayer said in a statement.
Earlier this month, Amazon announced that it will open a new fulfillment center in the logistics park. The retail giant will occupy a new 800,000-square-foot facility. This location will bring about 1,000 new full-time jobs to the Kansas City market.
Amazon will fill the new InlandPort XIV building in the facility.
Construction will begin soon on another industrial spec building in the Kansas City market, with work scheduled to begin on a new 250,000-square-foot building near Interstate-435 and Frontage Road. Mayer said that the focus for the next several quarters, then, will be on how quickly users will fill all the new industrial space.
Cushman & Wakefield reported that the Jackson County submarket in Missouri was the primary driver of demand in the first quarter, absorbing 808,000 square feet of net industrial space.
