From the Northeast to the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast, industrial markets across the Eastern U.S. are evolving at different speeds. At NAIOP’s I.CON East this week in Jersey City, New Jersey, a panel of market leaders analyzed migration patterns, supply pipelines, absorption trends and shifting capital flows to identify where fundamentals remain strongest and where caution is warranted.
JLL Vice Chairman Leslie Lanne served as moderator, with panelists Gregory Boler Jr., founder and managing partner, KMT Partners LLC; Emily Cannon, chief investment officer, Dogwood Industrial Properties; and Clark Machemer, senior managing director, Crow Holdings Development.
The panelists agreed that we’re in a period of normalization after the expansion of the COVID-19 era. Cannon cited port volumes, generalized demand, absorption and other metrics.
The question now, she said, is whether industrial is still cyclical or if it’s a “forever-tailwind business.”
“We can’t time the market in the East Coast markets that we’re all in,” Machemer said. His company recently closed on a site in South New Jersey that they signed an LOI [letter of intent] for in 2019; it took six years to get through the entitlement process.
“The way I describe the market today, especially from a development side, is that it’s back to how it used to be, which is a grind,” Machemer said, far from the relatively smooth days of 2018 to 2022.
What’s key now is execution and identifying the right locations for development, Machemer said, “So you can get through it in as much of a predictable pattern as possible.”
“It’s not easy, but the folks in this room are all problem solvers,” Machemer said, “And we’ll find ways to get through the issues that we encounter, be it regulatory issues, market changing issues, rents up, rents down, rates up or down.”
Machemer said that he used to always look at demand for the East Coast; now, he focuses on the supply side. “When you look at that, it can help you project what rents might be into the future if there’s going to be rent growth.”
The panelists work across a wide range of geographic areas, Lanne noted, and asked the panelists, “What are you prioritizing?”
“Every site we look at, we have a slightly different thesis,” Machemer said. The regulatory environment can be challenging on the state and local levels. Having local municipalities or leadership that is supportive of a project is key, he noted, and provides a more predictable path forward for a project. There are more than 560 municipalities in New Jersey alone, and it’s important to know what works in one versus another.
“I look at where there is a confluence of population labor as well as a good amount of infrastructure from an interstate standpoint,” Bohler said. He acknowledged a bias toward his home base of Atlanta but noted that it has good population growth. Pennsylvania – not just the Lehigh Valley – is also a favorite, he said, along with some secondary markets like Nashville and Charlotte, North Carolina.
“For so long, we’ve invested around dense population centers and interstates, and now [we might be looking at] substations and proximity to power,” Cannon said. “For us, it’s moving to markets that we’ve been able to identify that have non-consumer demand tailwinds at the moment.” She had historically focused on areas of the Southeast, and her team is now taking a closer look at some Midwest markets.
“Now, with this AI and supply chain future, we’re looking at markets that just have underlying infrastructure benefits that we think will be the drivers of that consumption,” Cannon added.
“Every call is about big box right now of 900,000-square-feet or more,” Lanne said. But not every market can accommodate that, and there may be headwinds to face including legislative issues, potential NIMBYism, and securing entitlements.
“We get a lot of questions about what’s coming to market, what’s hitting, what’s working and what’s not working,” Cannon said. “And I think just we see time and time again that there are markets where there are profiles of deals that trade and profiles of deals that don’t trade; I call them the have and have nots.”
This post is brought to you by JLL, the social media and conference blog sponsor of NAIOP’s I.CON East 2026. Learn more about JLL at www.us.jll.com or www.jll.ca.
