COLUMBUS—Strong tenant activity in the past few years has encouraged a number of top developers to start breaking ground on class A distribution buildings in this centrally-located city. And NorthPoint Development has just provided the latest proof that even the largest speculative buildings here will quickly fill up.

Saddle Creek Logistics Services has continued its national expansion by agreeing to a long-term lease for all of 6606 Pontius Rd. in suburban Groveport, the firm's second location in the state of Ohio. As reported in GlobeSt.com, NorthPoint just finished the speculative 1,001,344 square foot industrial facility located in Groveport Industrial Park.

Newmark Grubb Knight Frank's senior managing director Benton Benalcazar represented Saddle Creek in the search for its new location, along with senior vice president Ladson Montgomery of Newmark Grubb Phoenix Realty Group. JLL marketed the property for NorthPoint.

"In the end, 6606 Pontius Road offered the square footage needed as well as an ideal location within a cutting-edge facility, making it a perfect fit for our client," said Benalcazar. 

NorthPoint and Saddle Creek are hardly the only companies that see the benefit of launching new projects in the Columbus metro area. Last summer, Duke Realty Corp. announced that, along with the Columbus Regional Airport Authority and Capitol Square, Ltd., it will build a 482,300 square foot warehouse at Rickenbacker Global Logistics Park southeast of Columbus. INNO-PAK, LLC, a Delaware, OH-based designer, manufacturer and distributor of packaging products for the grocery and food service industries, had already agreed to lease more than half of this space.

"We view the Columbus industrial market as firing on all cylinders," Dan Wendorf, a Columbus-based executive vice president and supply chain specialist for JLL, told GlobeSt.com. The company recently put out a special report on the industrial market here and the role it plays in the nation's distribution network.

According to the JLL study, 47% of the US population, and 33% of the Canadian, lies within a 10-hour drive of Columbus. Although that is comparable to Indianapolis, another giant in the distribution business, Wendorf said Columbus-area facilities "can service the East Coast and the Southeast more efficiently."

Since 2010, the vacancy rate among industrial properties here sank from 12.4% to around 6.0%, a decline that far outpaced the national average. Furthermore, in 2014 tenants in the metro area absorbed 4.7 million square feet, also a much faster pace than the US overall.

Saddle Creek is a 3PL providing warehousing, transportation, packaging and fulfillment services. Its expansion illustrates the growing importance of logistics to the national real estate market. It now has 41 locations nationwide including a location in Sheffield Village, OH.

Last spring, it agreed to completely occupy the new 673 building at Gateway Commerce Center in the Metro East submarket of St. Louis. The company plans to use the 673,137 square-foot speculative building for a client that until now did not have a distribution operation in the St. Louis area. And in the summer Saddle Creek agreed to occupy a 1.1 million square foot build-to-suit facility at the CenterPoint Intermodal Center in Joliet, IL. At the time, that transaction was the largest industrial transaction and build-to-suit year-to-date in the Midwest region of the US, according to NGKF officials.

Saddle Creek expects to take occupancy of its new Groveport location in February of 2016. Montgomery has represented Saddle Creek nationally since 1994 and has completed over 30 transactions for the firm, totaling more than six million square feet of industrial space, including the Joliet deal.

The Groveport property features 36' ceilings, ample car and trailer parking, a cross-dock warehouse, 100 dock positions, four drive-in doors, an ESFR sprinkler system and a fifteen-year, 100% real estate tax abatement.

Benalcazar added that Saddle Creek views this transaction as a long-term investment that should bring many new employment opportunities to the Columbus area. "Hiring has already begun," he said.