Large warehouse trades hit record as growth at Port of Savannah spurs investors.
As the Port of Savannah invests in an expansion aiming to grab more shipping from the West Coast, large warehouse trades are setting records in Savannah’s industrial market.
Large warehouse transactions of $25M or more, which dropped 29% nationally last year, surged by 65% in the Savannah market to a record $995M, according to Green Street’s data.
Until 2021, the Savannah market had recorded just one industrial transaction worth more than $100M—since then there have been 11 industrial trades of $100M or more, including the current record of $161M, set by ASB Real Estate Investments’ purchase of the 1.4M SF Savannah Logistics Center in December 2021.
This year is already off to a good start in Savannah, with a new 1.2M SF industrial park fetching $104M, or $84/SF, in a sale last month.
Kansas City-based VanTrust Real Estate is aiming to top that with its offering of two industrial buildings, delivered last year and in 2022, encompassing 1.8M SF at the Interstate West industrial park in Ellabell.
JLL has been tapped to market the property, with bids expected to come in around $100/SF, Green Street reported.
The buildings include a 1.2M SF facility at 54 Logistics Drive fully leased by WebstaurantStore, a national online wholesale restaurant supplier, and a 638K SF facility at 77 Logistics Drive with tenants including Hyundai, which is building a 17M SF EV and battery plant less than two miles from the industrial park, which is 17 miles from the Port of Savannah.
Savannah’s industrial market, which achieved the fourth-largest annual net absorption nationally in 2023, started the year strong, with supply and demand nearly at an equilibrium in the first quarter. The market notched 2.6M SF of net absorption while 2.9M SF of new supply was delivered in Q1 2024, according to JLL’s Q1 market report.
JLL said there are active tenant requirements encompassing more than 27M SF in the Savannah market, which has more than 32M SF of industrial space under construction—of which nearly 75% is pre-leased.
The Port of Savannah, currently the fourth-busiest port in the nation for container traffic, is planning up to $4.3B in upgrades to challenge the top three ports-Los Angeles, Long Beach and the Port of NY-NJ-as more shipping heads to the East Coast.
As of February, the Port of Savannah’s TEU import volumes are up 18.4% year-over-year, JLL reported.
The Georgia Port Authority (GPA) recently approved a $66M contract for further enhancements at the port’s Ocean Terminal, which is aiming to expand its capacity from 300K TEUs to more than 1.5M. GPA is also planning to spend $189M to raise the Talmadge Bridge over the Savannah River to allow taller container ships to reach expanded docks at the port.
