Anthony Rimikis, senior vice president of development &construction at Newtown Square, PA-based REIT Brandywine RealtyTrust says large companies tend to be more attractive to developerswhen it comes to build-to-suit industrial deals because they knowwhat they're doing and have cash in their pockets. "The creditissue is always premier for developers. A credit-worthy tenantmakes it so much easier. A Dow or an Exxon is certainly preferableto a small company with no track record. We did a build-to-suit forInternational Paper where the tenant committed to half of a100,000-sf building. That lease gave that tenant a whole other lookthan if we were thinking about putting up a 100,000-sf building onspec."

Still, Rimikis doesn't see build-to-suit as the coming wave forthe industrial market. "It's no different from office. You can havea sign on a piece of ground forever and no broker or tenant showsup. The minute the walls start going up, the people appear. All ofa sudden people realize it's a new project and they want to talk toyou."

"The biggest problem is that nobody plans ahead of time. If aclient is looking for a warehouse and they can find a buildingthat's going up, they'll grab it, because they're usually behindthe curve," says Jonathan Schultz, president of Woodbridge,NJ-based real estate firm the Schultz Organization. "You need tostart planning two years out. You have to find the property, gothrough the approvals and then build. Larger companies tend to domore planning, just more corporate forecasting than smallercompanies."