NorthPoint Development Begins First Tampa Project

Tampa Airport Logistics Center. Rendering courtesy of Avison Young

NorthPoint Development has acquired a 19.2-acre site in Tampa, Fla., where it will break ground immediately on Tampa Airport Logistics Center, an approximately 297,250-square-foot master-planned industrial project. Avison Young is in charge with leasing the property.

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The two Class A buildings, at 5450 Johns Road and 5416 W. Sligh Ave., are slated for delivery in the fourth quarter of 2021. Building 1 and Building 2 will be about 100,936 square feet and 196,318 square feet, respectively. WELBRO Building Corp. is the general contractor.

The location offers easy access to the Veteran’s Expressway (State Road 589), Dale Mabry Highway and I-275, reportedly making the logistics center appropriate for freight forwarding, last-mile and light assembly users, in a market with a high demand for large blocks of space.

In a prepared statement, Tim McElroy, NorthPoint Development’s director of industrial development, said that because of land constraints, new development in the area has been minimal for more than a decade.

Tampa Airport Logistics Center is NorthPoint’s first industrial project in Tampa.

Avison Young Principals Clay Witherspoon, who is also managing director of the brokerage’s Tampa operations, and Tim Callahan will oversee leasing services for Tampa Airport Logistics Center.

Witherspoon noted in a prepared statement that “demand for industrial space over 50,000 square feet has remained consistently high near the airport” for more than a decade.

Stable industrial market  

Unsurprisingly, with its economy heavily reliant on leisure and hospitality, the Tampa Bay region saw unemployment continue to edge up in late 2020, according to a fourth-quarter report from Cushman & Wakefield. The industrial space market ended 2020 with a slight decrease (20 basis points) in overall vacancy, to 6.9 percent.

Tampa Bay’s West Side submarket had an overall vacancy of 5.5 percent on an inventory of 12.8 million square feet. The submarket was generally stable, with only a small amount of negative absorption in 2020 and just 60,000 square feet of space delivered, also according to Cushman & Wakefield.

In February, Home Depot opened a 1.5-million-square-foot distribution center at NorthPoint’s two-building, 2.3 million-square-foot Dallas Global Industrial Center.