Note how strong the industrial category is compared to the other commercial real estate property types. Office and retail are the two most vulnerable.
Moving forward with the slow decline in rents and values, industrial real estate is well positioned to weather economic challenges.
Here is a great summary from the WSJ: Americans built up about $2.1 trillion in excess savings during the pandemic and its immediate aftermath, a cushion for household budgets and a boost for consumer spending. Since August 2021, they’ve drawn down about $1.9 trillion of that. “This implies that there is less than $190 billion of excess savings remaining in the aggregate economy. Should the recent pace of drawdowns persist—for example, at average rates from the past three, six or 12 months—aggregate excess savings would likely be depleted in the third quarter of 2023,” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco economists Hamza Abdelrahman and Luiz Oliveira write in a blog post.
The dwindling pandemic savings during 2023 makes me wonder if that is correlated with the dwindling industrial demand that started at the beginning in 2023 and continues here in Los Angeles. Tenant demand for warehouses has fallen sharply this year. Buyer demand has been dampened by the interest rate increases. If the pandemic savings do run out this year then I wonder if consumer spending will follow. If that is the case and consumer spending accounts for about ⅔ of GDP then a slowdown could materialize.
As with any insurance market, the commercial property insurance market is constantly evolving, with new trends and challenges emerging that can impact both insurers and policyholders alike. Across the country, there have been several regulatory changes in recent years that have added costs and increased compliance requirements for insurers in this space. Specifically in California, there has been an increase in non-renewal notices as many insurance companies withdraw from the marketplace, most notably in Los Angeles County but also throughout the entire state.
California has become one of the most difficult places to write insurance, so many carriers are exiting the market, reducing capacity, or only looking to insure best-in-class buildings.
Risk. Concern has grown over the incidence of natural disasters including wildfires, flooding, landslides, and earthquakes. This has caused premiums to further increase and caused reinsurance costs to be passed down to policy holders.
Insurers also consider a property’s likelihood for litigation and heightened number of claims. Multi-family is considered high risk because the human factor by nature yields an increased frequency of claims. The same can be said of retail shopping centers where there is increased foot traffic. In essence, the more people, the more claims. Industrial buildings and office properties, on the other hand, are considered moderate to lower risk, unless they have a very high vacancy rate which can make them susceptible to theft.
Building Age: In Los Angeles where the building stock is aging, the preferred market prioritizes either structures built within the last 30 years or those with records reflecting regular maintenance and upgrades. Insurance companies don’t inspect properties every year, which can have unfavorable outcomes for buildings that go several years without review. For example, many carriers are shying away from Los Angeles’ Downtown and Garment District because of the high incidence of claims coming from older buildings that haven’t been kept up. A lot of these older buildings are being placed on the Excess and Surplus Market (E&S) when the risk is too high to insure, which results in higher rates, and in some cases, limited coverage.
Here are some strategies:
In the WSJ article, The U.S. Is Running Out of Land, a professor of finance who studies land values cites that “Land now accounts for 47% of U.S. home values…That is up from 38% in 2012 and less than 20% in the early 1960s.”
So that intrigued me and I pulled a sample of 1,315 industrial zoned parcels from Downtown Los Angeles to the City of Vernon. See below graphic. Dividing the Los Angeles County Assessor Land Value amount by the Total Assessment results in 71% of these industrial properties’ value is the land component. The Total Assessment includes improvements such as warehouse and manufacturing buildings constructed on the land.
That is a strikingly high percentage for land value but should not be surprising given the rapid increase in prices per square foot for land sales in the last decade. In the top section of the graphic, which is the DTLA Arts District, land values have ranged from $300-450/SF in recent years. In the bottom section, City of Vernon land was not long ago $50-100/SF and is now approaching $200/SF.
The Central Los Angeles Industrial Market has been an Infill Market for many years which has resulted in rapid increases in land values. If you own land in this area feel free to contact us.
Average Asking Lease Rates have climbed dramatically in the last several years with the largest increases in 2021 and 2022. See below chart showing the steep rise for warehouse asking rental rates in Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura and the Inland Empire per AIRCRE MLS data. These are the major industrial property markets in Southern California. Individual markets and submarkets vary along with building class quality.
