Industrial market veteran Jim Linn has joined Newmark Knight Frank as executive managing director, focusing on focus on industrial capital markets, and he is setting up for another healthy year of industrial activity. This year, Linn expects repositioning of class-B and class-C industrial space to be among the biggest opportunities for industrial capital in the Western US markets.

“The biggest opportunities for industrial capital will be repositioning class B- and class-C product in tier one markets in the Western Region,” Linn tells GlobeSt.com. “Local operators in tier two markets can take advantage of higher yields than in tier one markets for class B to class B- properties in secondary markets.”

In terms of geography, he expects Los Angeles, the East Bay in Northern California and Puget Sound to continue to be the industrial leaders in 2019. These three markets should continue to see strong rent growth and an absorption rate that keeps up with new development activity, according to Linn. “These areas have logistic nodes, where product is brought in through the sea ports from the Pacific Rim or intermodals where product is imported domestically from the Midwest and Texas and Eastern Seaports,” he says. “These are land-constrained markets, pushing prices on what little land is available. Additionally entitlements are challenging as they remain both time consuming and expensive. We're not only seeing an increase in e-commerce, but also B2B business is growing in all of these markets.”