Industrial real estate is making a cautious return from the high highs and relatively lower lows it has experienced since the pandemic, industry leaders say.
Executives discussed some of the newer frontiers and constraints in terms of building and financing various industrial projects at Commercial Observer’s Industrial, Data Centers & Logistics Forum event at etc.venues at 601 Lexington Avenue earlier this week. Topics of concern included the matter of growing NIMBYism and power scarcity.
The original article can be found here: https://commercialobserver.com/2026/04/commercial-observer-event-industrial-data-centers-logistics-forum/
Tuesday morning started off with a keynote session with Jeremy Hellinger of J.P. Morgan Chase, Matthew Ostrower of Link Logistics and Andrew Warin of Newmark, who spoke to shifts in some of the national market fundamentals taking place across the industrial sector. Changes include declining asking rents on the West Coast, and a U-shaped recovery following the pandemic as e-commerce took off and the sector became overbuilt.
That momentum from 2021 to 2023 was mainly driven by Amazon’s logistics growth, which punished traditional retail and drove a building spree that overcorrected to anticipated demand, according to Hellinger. “It’s remarkable how much industrial flew under the radar in terms of how challenging it was to lend on for a long time,” Hellinger said. “Industrial was one of the more challenging assets to underwrite, and it actually still is very challenging to underwrite. It’s still very early in the recovery of industrial, and we’ve all seen the signs in leasing traction. … It was probably the most overbuilt sector in commercial real estate, even more so in office.”
The latest trend now seems to be that tenants are optimizing warehouse space by using robotics, and storing inventory from floor to ceiling where it can more safely and efficiently be retrieved and shipped using machines, according to the speakers.
The first panel of the morning — titled State of the Market: Macroeconomic Trends & Emerging Opportunities Fueling Growth for this Critical Sector — was moderated by Jonathan Adelsberg of law firm Herrick, with speakers Mark Levy of FRP Development, Richard Prokup of Mapletree, Alex Redfearn of Redfearn Capitaland Peter Zuk of Oxford Property Group.
The discussion revolved around global events such as tariffs — which for more than a year have undergone shifting policies from the White House — and uncertainty from the ongoing war in Iran as it impacts trade through the Strait of Hormuz.
Essentially, tenants of industrial space are looking only at what they can control: their domestic supply chains.
