CBRE's Zubel Outlines Industrial Outlook

CHICAGO, IL- In yesterday's GlobeSt.com, we reported that CBRE announced this week that Chris Zubel, 38, has been named managing director and will oversee the Chicago Industrial
group, manage the Schaumburg office and help run overall Chicago operations.

As Zubel looked ahead, he explained that "industrial real estate is in a total recovery mode.” From a leasing perspective, the improvement has been national. “I think you can make a blanket statement that the recovery is happening across the primary and secondary markets.”

That does not mean, however, that all of the market's players have the same approach. “Most of the investors,” he explains, “are still looking for Class A buildings in core areas.” Furthermore, each submarket has subtleties. For example, in the Chicago region, Zubel's focus, the west suburban region along I-55, due to a combination of available land and good transportation options, has seen the revival of speculative construction of huge big-box distribution facilities, some encompassing hundreds of thousands of square-feet.

In the O'Hare submarket, construction has begun, but on a much smaller scale. He points out that Bridge Development has begun a roughly 125,000-square-foot building near the airport, a more typical effort for this area.

“So it really varies across the submarkets in Chicago.” But even in the older, denser submarkets like O'Hare, some of the developers have started building on spec. “Absolutely that's still significant because we haven't seen it for so long.”