-August 12,2023-
The Wall Street Journal reports that a drop in imports particularly from China this year is affecting demand for warehouse space in Southern California. U.S. goods imports from China fell 25 percent during the first six months of 2023, the Commerce Department reported recently.
That in turn may be decreasing demand for Visalia warehouse space that has enjoyed spillover from the Southland in the past few years.
Last year plans for millions of square feet of new industrial space in Visalia seems to moving forward. But in mid 2023- few of those projects have gone forward. Only Newport-based CapRock has broken ground on a 1.2 million square feet “spec” space in the past month.
Here is the report from the WSJ this week.
Cooling Warehouse Markets-WSJ
There’s a new feature on the scene in Southern California’s tight warehousing market—empty space. Industrial vacancy rates in the region’s logistics-heavy Inland Empire have jumped in the past year, the WSJ Logistics Report’s Liz Young writes, as high leasing costs, capacity constraints and plummeting import volumes eat into demand. Warehouses there have been effectively full in recent years, with the vacancy rate down near 1% and some companies storing goods in parking lots. Real-estate services firm Savills says the rate in the Inland Empire reached 3.8% last quarter, still anemic by historical measures but a reversal from pandemic-era tightening trends. Landlords are coping with a receding goods economy that is hitting the major import gateway particularly hard. The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach handled about 1.3 million fewer containers in the first half of this year than they did in the same period in 2022.
Here is the the June statistics report for the the Port of Long Beach showing both imports and exports are down this year.
PORT OF LONG BEACH
