He reiterates that “the big theme around here right now is spec, spec, spec. It's seven million square feet, so if you're talking to Dallas, Atlanta or West Coast brokers, that may not sound like a whole lot compared to these larger markets. But for a secondary market, that's a lot.”

It doesn't exactly hurt that it's new product, built to satisfy modern requirements. “Everything that's going up is state of the art, 32-foot clear heights,” says Orschein. “A lot of it is larger products, so we're seeing a lot of 300,000-square-foot-plus buildings going up, a lot of cross-dock bulk buildings. A couple of developers will be coming on line with 200,000-square-foot single-loaded buildings to satisfy the demand from the smaller users as well.”

Farther west is Omaha, which at 68 million square feet represents the smallest industrial market in the SIOR survey. Yet Tim Kerrigan, CCIM, SIOR, a VP with Investors Realty Inc. in Nebraska's largest city, points out that it meets the fundamental requirements of real estate success, namely location, location, location. “We sit at the intersections of Interstates 80 and 29; that's a huge advantage,” he tells GlobeSt.com. “Geographically, it's literally at the center of the country. It puts us within a one-day delivery time of a huge part of the US market.”

Although Kerrigan says there's no evidence yet of Amazon establishing its presence in the area, he thinks it's fair to assume that there will be, sooner or later.“There's a lot of territory in the Plains states; if we're truly going to do same-day deliveries to in business-to-business and consumer-to-consumer, somebody's going to have to build facilities in Omaha and the surrounding area.”

While Omaha may be best known as the home of Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway empire, Kerrigan notes that the market is “fast on its way to becoming a hotbed for data centers. You don't see more than a handful of these huge, $200-million enterprise centers in any given year, but Omaha has had two in the past three years, and we have more in the pipeline.”

Although Chicago isn't all that far from Milwaukee, the seven-county region of southeast Wisconsin has become a key industrial market in its own right. “What we've seen in the past seven years of recovery is remarkable strength, and I think you're seeing it across the US,” Jeff Hoffman, SIOR, CCIM, a principal with Cushman & Wakefield/The Boerke Co. in Milwaukee, tells GlobeSt.com. “We have a stock of 275 million square feet, and our vacancy rate is down to 4.1%.”

It's even lower in some of the region's submarkets, such as Mitchell Airport with vacancies of just 2.2%. “You can't remember a time when markets have been compressed that low,” Hoffman says.

One challenge has been the manufacturing sector, which has been hard-pressed recently. “The state of Wisconsin jockeys back and forth with Indiana as the state with the highest dependence on manufacturing for private-sector employment,” says Hoffman. “A lot of our large manufacturers since last August or September have been in flat-out recessionary enviromnents. We supply a lot to the oil and gas industry, so your local machine shops have been hit hard.”

That being said, absorption locally continues to outpace new deliveries, Hoffman says. The gap has been filled by and large with warehouse-fulfillment, on both the business-to-business and business-to-consumer sides.

Another fundamental of commercial real estate, asking rents, has seen year-over-year increases nationwide. However, Kerrigan says, “We're seeing rental rates rise across the market, but still not keeping pace with the cost of construction. I would presume that construction costs have increased at an increasing rate everywhere, certainly in our market. So people are trying to understand the disconnect between rental rates and construction costs.”