Jon Chesto
Managing Editor, Print- Boston Business Journal
With sky-high rents showing no signs of abating in Greater Boston, it’s a good time to be an apartment landlord. But the owners of industrial space are the ones who are particularly lucky right now.
Take a look at this stat for manufacturing space, in a report issued by Richards Barry Joyce Partners (now known as Transwestern RBJ following Transwestern’s acquisition of the firm). The vacancy rate for Greater Boston’s manufacturing buildings was 12.5 percent at the end of October, down from 18.5 percent a year ago. Manufacturing tenants have filled up more than 1 million additional square feet of building space in the past two years, including 465,000 square feet in the last quarter alone. A spokesman for the real estate brokerage tells me we haven’t seen the vacancy rate this low for manufacturing properties since the third quarter of 2003.
The current streak has favored manufacturing properties along the northern half of the Route 128 and Interstate 495 beltways, according to RBJ. And a dearth of new space has been causing a real dilemma for tenants, as no new manufacturing space has been added to the region. This preference for new space is particularly notable in the I-495 North market: In that region, 1.3 percent of the space built since 1983 is vacant, while 31.8 percent of the older space is empty.
The RBJ report ticks off a few big leases in the manufacturing sector, although a couple sound more like warehouses than manufacturing plants. (RBJ, in the same report, said 15.6 percent of Greater Boston’s warehouse space is vacant.) There’s Got Books’ lease of 163,000 square feet in Wilmington and fruit distributor Yell-O-Glow’s occupation of 61,000 square feet in Chelsea.
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