Industrial Activity in Detroit Hits 20-Year High

DETROIT—Although the revival of Detroit’s downtown office market has attracted a lot of notice lately, it’s the regional industrial market that is really setting records. Newmark Grubb Knight Frank released its third quarter report on the sector this week and found that the vacancy level fell to a 20-year low and developers have more projects underway than at any time since 2003.

“In many ways this was not a surprise,” John DeGroot, vice president of research, NGKF, tells GlobeSt.com. “The market bottomed out right at the end of 2010 when the vacancy rate hit about 16%. There was 51 million square feet of space available. But once the auto companies began to revive, the Detroit industrial market just took off and the overall vacancy went from 16% to 6%.”