John Morris, a senior managing director of Cushman & Wakefield’s Global Consulting Group, said the competition for smaller industrial properties is extremely strong virtually everywhere across the country. “It is all being leased up, in every market,” he said. For larger and customized storage and distribution space, the situation was highly differentiated.

Nationally, according to CW, there is currently 36.9 million square feet of industrial product under construction, including 6 million square feet in California’s Inland Empire region and 4.1 million square feet along the Pennsylvania 1-81/I-78 corridor. “In New Jersey, not so much,” he noted. There has been virtually no speculative construction in the state in the past year.

Tim Feemster, senior managing director of Global Corporate Services for Newmark Grubb Knight Frank, said New York/New Jersey ports are handling increased distribution traffic, and noted that the region may have already surpassed the Long Beach area to become the second busiest to Los Angeles.

“When they raise the Bayonne Bridge, so the large-capacity ships coming through the widened Panama Canal in 2014 can get through, I’m willing to say that the East Coast ports will someday be handling half the import business.”

The troubled economics of the trucking industry have made it the weak link in integrated port/rail/truck distribution, noted Feemster. There has been increased investment in railroad lines nationally, he said – although much of it was for maintenance of existing lines, rather than improving “inter-modal” shipping of goods to move large shipping containers by rail. Yet 70 percent of domestic shipping is handled by truck.

Meanwhile, said Morris, trucking prices have not gone up in 12 years. “Can you imagine trying to respond to the need for greater intermodal shipping with zero increase in investing?” he said.

Feemster said the cost of fuel is driving the cost structure of shipping across the board. “The profitability of steam ship lines is in question as well,” he said. “With the increase in the size of ships, the rate structure, the fuel costs, the future of our ability to do shipping by water is touchy.”