Atlanta Industrial Hits Boom Status

ATLANTA—Atlanta's industrial market is setting records. For a quick analysis of the latest numbers, we turned to Sim Doughtie, president of King Industrial Realty/CORFAC International, in Atlanta. His bottom line: Atlanta industrial is booming.

GlobeSt.com: The Atlanta Metro Area is the largest industrial market in the entire Southeast. To give readers a sense of the size of the market, what is the total inventory and how many Atlanta submarkets does King Industrial Realty/CORFAC International track?

Doughtie: Overall inventory is 680 million square feet of distribution and service center space in 10 regions. We track 14,644 buildings and 23,802 businesses. The vast majority—over 654 million square feet—is distribution product.

GlobeSt.com: Word is that the market is soaring and very much improved from the depths of recent recession. What are some of the telling data points from the second quarter this year?

Doughtie: Second quarter activity set a single quarter record with over 18.2 million square feet leased or sold. When added to the activity from the previous three quarters, we strung together over 59.6 million square feet.

This represents the second highest activity level ever recorded for a four-quarter period. There was over 6.3 million square feet of positive net absorption. Combined with the previous three quarters, we show a total of over 19.7 million square feet of positive net absorption for the last four quarters.

GlobeSt.com: How has all this activity and net absorption impacted the overall Atlanta vacancy rate?

Doughtie: We use the term “availability rate” which is slightly different than “vacancy rate” because a property might be occupied but available for lease or vacant but leased and thus, unavailable other than for subleasing. For the second quarter, the availability rate dropped one-tenth of a percent to 14%—the lowest it has been since the fourth quarter of 2000. And just four-to-five years ago, the overall availability rate was over 20%.