Hamilton Development Update
The past 5 years have seen a significant surge in interest in the Hamilton area from industrial real estate developers. Many private and institutional groups have purchased large land sites in the Hamilton market with aspirations of building industrial buildings for lease.
This interest has been driven by relatively low land prices (relative to the GTA), availability of large #land tracts, great highway connectivity, and access to the 2nd largest labour market in Ontario. With the growth of e-commerce and nearshoring of 3manufacturing, the demand for industrial real estate seems insatiable and groups that cannot find suitable real estate solutions in the typical #Toronto markets are willing to entertain Hamilton locations. Large investments from Amazon and IKEA are high-profile examples of the attractiveness of Hamilton from a site selection perspective. The existing inventory of the Hamilton submarket is approximately 35 million square feet. The Hamilton #industrial market has recently seen consistently low vacancy rates, as low as 0.5%.
Team Murray & Faldowski is tracking that planned industrial developments in the next two years will total over 5 million square feet, which is a 15% addition within 24 months. How easily will this space be absorbed? Our team believes that the space will be easily absorbed and that the Hamilton market can accommodate significantly more industrial product. Of the 2.9 million square feet coming to market in 2023 1.6 million of it has already been leased. There are threats to Hamilton’s continued industrial real estate prosperity, principally, lower-cost markets like #Brantford and #Niagara are already attracting industrial developers and will be highly competitive to #Hamilton as lower-cost markets. Overall, we are bullish on Hamilton’s continued industrial development renaissance.
Team News
Value Award Winner
Roll out the blue carpet, we have a Spirit Award winner on the team! A huge congratulations to Justin Venancio for his well-deserved win of this year’s ‘Value Award’. Justin inspires our team daily with his energy, positivity, professionalism, and sense of humour – despite dealing with adversity that would sideline most. Look up ‘great corporate culture’ in the dictionary and Justin’s face will appear.