ST. LOUIS—The industrial market in this region keeps expanding. Just days after another group announced it was launching a massive speculative building in the Metro East submarket, officials from PCCP, LLC and its joint venture partner TriStar Properties say they will finish a 717,060 square foot, class A industrial warehouse building within Gateway Commerce Center in Edwardsville, IL, also in Metro East, by the end of the year. And both of these buildings will feature 36' clear heights, a significant distinction from competing structures in the region, many of which have 32' clear heights.

“Warehouse requirements have been changing and as big boxes are driving the industrial market, clear heights have also pushed upwards,” Dorian Farhang, assistant vice president with PCCP, tells GlobeSt.com. “Not all tenants need the added clear height and certainly sticking with a 32' clear for our new building was in the discussion. But we chose to provide a 36' clear building in order to provide the highest quality and most functional building to the market that will be able to accommodate a wider range of prospective tenants.”

As reported in GlobeSt.com, PCCP and TriStar recently completed Gateway 673 at the Gateway Commerce Center, a 2,000 acre industrial park. The 673,137 square foot industrial building has 32' clear heights and was fully pre-leased during development to Saddle Creek Corp., a Lakeland, FL-based 3PL firm. Considering the level of activity in the market, the quick lease-up is perhaps not a surprise. In 2014, for example, tenants absorbed a historic level of space and sent the region's vacancy rate plummeting to a 10-year low.