CHICAGO—Southeast Wisconsin has become one of the Chicago region's hottest industrial markets, and developers are starting to take long looks at Racine County just to the north, opening up the possibility of linking the Chicago and Milwaukee markets. A new 376,000 square-foot speculative building in Sturtevant developed by Ashley Capital will open by the fourth quarter, for example, and it is just the first of four planned for the Enterprise Business Park, an 86-acre industrial park located on Highway H.

“It's the only one coming out of the ground in Racine County right now,” John Sharpe, principal of Lee & Associates Illinois, tells GlobeSt.com. Lee & Associates and the Milwaukee-based Boerke Co. have been named the exclusive leasing agents for the New York-based Ashley's new spec. But there is also a lot of talk about other industrial developers launching projects in the area. “I think it will be clear in the next sixty days what will happen the rest of the year,” since developers will have to break ground very soon if they want to finish before the winter sets in.

Sharpe adds that there is already a robust level of development nearer to Illinois in Kenosha County. Chicago-based Bridge Development Partners, LLC, has just started a 400-acre business park at Hwy. 142 and I-94, across from the new 500,000 square-foot Amazon.com fulfillment center. At the same time, Bridge sold 200 of the acres to Uline, Inc., and the Pleasant Prairie, WI-based distributor of packing materials plans to build by mid-2016 a nearly three million square-foot campus, with initial plans for a one million square-foot warehouse facility.

And investors have also taken an interest in the region's industrial properties, a further boost for those contemplating putting shovels in the ground. As reported in GlobeSt.com, CenterPoint Properties Trust recently sold a 10-building, 1.7 million square-foot industrial portfolio with properties throughout Southeast Wisconsin, one of the largest industrial portfolio sales in the Midwest in recent years. The portfolio includes buildings in the Milwaukee, Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee County submarkets.

For the first building in the Enterprise Business Park “we are looking at both manufacturers and distributors,” says Sharpe. “We're the only large building available in the submarket,” he adds, so a large user could take the whole thing, or smaller users could take as little as 40,000 square feet. And due to the location, the park may draw users from Milwaukee and the Chicago area. “The remaining three buildings will be developed either speculatively or as build to suit construction.”

Partners-in-Design Architects is acting as the project architect. The general contractor is Berghammer Construction and Pinnacle Engineering Group is providing civil engineering services. The facility, which Bank of America has agreed to finance, will include 32' clear height, seven inch concrete floors, 227 parking spaces, bay size of 52 feet by 50 feet, fluorescent lighting, 60 exterior docks, eight drive-in-doors, 71 trailer parking spaces and an ESFR sprinkler system.

“We are expecting a great deal of interest in this development,” Sharpe says.