Eight brownfield properties dotting Southeast Michigan might soon be home to new warehouses, distribution centers or manufacturing plants thanks to the Detroit Regional Partnership’s Verified Industrial Properties program.
The goal of this program, better known by its acronym of VIP by DRP, is to boost the site-readiness of brownfields throughout Southeast Michigan. The program, which launched in October of last year, offers incentives to encourage partners to submit available properties to an online portal.
Developers can then search the portal to find sites that fit their needs.
That portal, verifiedindustrialproperties.com, is a key to the program: It highlights former brownfield sites that have been vetted for environmental, zoning and other development-readiness factors. Third-party engineers verify the condition of vacant industrial parcels of 10 acres or more by evaluating how easy or difficult it would be to connect to utilities, whether wetlands mark the site, if there are easements for developers to deal with and other key factors.
Examples of sites listed in the portal include the former Summit Place Mall in Waterford Township, land owned by Walbridge in Lyon Township and land tracts that are part of the Detroit Region Aerotropolis near Detroit Metro Airport.
“We created this program with the mission of creating new jobs for our residents,” said Justin Robinson, executive vice president with the Detroit Regional Partnership. “We can create those jobs by attracting new companies to Southeast Michigan. The industrial sector is very hot right now, and the goal of the program is to encourage developers and companies to look at this part of Michigan.”
As Robinson says, the industrial vacancy rate in the Detroit region ranges from 2% to 4%, incredibly low. There are few buildings available, then, for end users.
This is causing more developers and end users to search for usable vacant land on which they can build new industrial facilities. The VIP program can help these users find such land in Southeast Michigan.
“We are stepping up and going to work on this issue,” Robinson said. “The key word is ‘proactive.’ We want to be proactive in finding ready sites for end users. We are not able to do what some areas are doing and buy land. Our objective is to make sure that we identify the strengths and weaknesses of these brownfield sites and that we list this information in our online portal. We want end users to see and understand what is out there for them in this region.”
As Shannon Selby, vice president of real estate for the Detroit Regional Partnership says, if you do nothing, you get nothing.
Selby says that verifiedindustrialproperties.com currently features information about 28 sites in the Southeast Michigan region. Visitors to the website can search by minimum acres, county, brownfield sites and greenfield sites. Each land site boasts its own engineering report and list of key data, Selby said.
The work done by the Detroit Regional Partnership’s engineering partners is key to the program’s success, Selby said. These engineers do site reporting work that takes about 10 weeks to complete. They then prepare a report on the quality, benefits and challenges of the brownfield and greenfield sites.
“We are proactively going after sites,” Selby said. “We rank these sites and prioritize those that present the most opportunity to end users. End users who are from out of the country and who don’t know Michigan can get all the information they need on the Detroit region, down to the county and down to an individual land site. There is a lot of information on the site that can really help companies make a decision on which land sites might be right for them.”
When developers and end users look for industrial sites, they often search 25 to 50 regions, Robinson said. They need information quickly, which is something the VIP’s online portal can provide.
“The reality is that these are fast-moving projects,” Robinson said. “End users aren’t calling brokers locally. They want to see the information about available land in a centralized platform so that they can compare us against Columbus, Dallas or any of the other regions that they are considering.”
Robinson said that the Detroit Regional Partnership is working with municipalities and the owners of available land to fund the physical site studies that provide the information on VIP’s web portal.
“We want to provide all the materials a company needs to make a decision,” Robinson said. “We want to give them the information they need to understand the status of a site.”
“Determining site readiness is a team sport,” Selby added. “It takes a collaboration of a number of us to make this happen.”
It’s also a necessity to attract companies to the region, Selby said.
“Having a program like this isn’t something that is nice to have,” Selby said. “It’s a must-have. Site selectors need as much information as they can find. Providing that information to them is mandatory if we want to stay in the game.”
Like in most parts of the country, the industrial sector is performing well in the Detroit market. Not even high interest rates, which have slowed industrial sales, have slowed the demand for industrial space by end users.
It doesn’t look like the demand for warehouse, distribution and manufacturing space will slow in the region anytime soon, either.
“During the early days of the pandemic, people worried that the industrial market would dry up,” Selby said. “But it didn’t. Demand for industrial space only accelerated during COVID. People wanted their packages on their front porches. That meant that companies had a demand for even more industrial space. It’s also why we need to have land ready for these companies.”
As Selby says, Michigan is a legacy industrial state. It’s why the state has so many brownfields ready for redevelopment. And it’s why recycling these sites and putting them back into use is so important for the state.
“The industrial market might have plateaued a bit recently, but it has plateaued at some of the highest activity levels we have ever seen,” Robinson said. “The scale of the industrial projects we are seeing, the intensity of the uses, is unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”
Selby will be participating in Michigan Real Estate Journal’s Detroit Industrial Summit being held Sept. 20 at The Community House in Birmingham, Michigan. Click here to register for the summit to learn even more about the region’s thriving industrial sector.
