The AIR CRE is the premier multiple listing service for industrial real estate such as warehouses and manufacturing buildings in Southern California. Whether you are a buyer or tenant or landlord or seller, this MLS is the service that all the top-tier brokers primarily use. It services industrial, office, retail, and other commercial real estate listings.
There are over 33,000 listings in the system for SoCal. And there are over 1,600 members in SoCal. So if you seek to search or list for sale or lease a warehouse or other commercial property in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside or Ventura counties, contact us as we are members of this MLS.
LoopNet, which is owned by Costar, is a second-tier MLS that we also use but it’s data pales in comparison to the AIR CRE and top firms mainly use it as a secondary marketing tool but don’t always put their listings there. The most active and major Los Angeles commercial real estate brokers use the AIR CRE, which is member owned and created in 1960.
Central Los Angeles industrial submarket overview with absorption and vacancy rate.
Supported by the phenomenal growth of e-commerce, leasing activity was strong in the first quarter after the steep declines experienced earlier in early 2020. In Q1, across the Central Market, 139 leases were signed for a total of 2,836,295 SF; the average asking rate was $0.96 PSF. Q1 leasing volume for Central LA was 25% higher than Q1 2020 levels. Another 133 warehouse properties, totaling 2,000,000 SF, were sold in the period with an average price of $291.43 PSF. The average rate will move up or down slightly quarter-to-quarter depending on how many older, functionally obsolete warehouse and manufacturing buildings are in the pool of available inventory. The limited amount of available first-generation, Class A space leases at a premium to the average rate.
The L.A. County industrial neighborhood of City Terrace has seen increased buyer and investor activity in the past few years. Not only have several properties sold in this up and coming area, but a new 200,000 square foot industrial building is under construction by a well known developer.
The heightened interest in this once sleepy area may be due to it’s proximity to the Arts District, Boyle Heights, and Lincoln Heights, and also between Cal State University L.A. and the USC Keck School of Medicine. Nearby a Biotech/Bioscience campus is being built with heavy interest from prospective tenants. These are exciting developments for one of the oldest industrial tracks in L.A.
A new opportunity is a 106,141 square foot land parcel with 40,000 square feet of old manufacturing buildings on it. This site is being offered for sale at land value. Allowed uses in this M2 zone are manufacturing, distribution, trucking, cannabis, and a variety of other industrial and commercial uses. One advantage of operating a business in unincorporated county lands is that there is no gross receipts revenue tax as there exists in the City of Los Angeles.
The City of Los Angeles is in the process of updating its land use plans. These plans are the way the City plans for the future. The Draft Boyle Heights Community Plan Update is the blueprint for guiding this change. For a PDF of the plan see Boyle Heights Zoning Plan Update. Note the industrial section known as The Flats, on the left side of the image, is being rezoned from Industrial to an Innovative zone. This may be a riff from the CASP multi-zoned ordinance passed for the area north of DTLA near LA State Park, the cornfield.
Industrial is 1 of 4 commercial property types (Industrial, Retail, Office and Multi-family) and is a broad category encompassing many different types of buildings with the most common being warehousing and distribution or manufacturing. Below are brief descriptions of 9 industrial property types.
Warehouse / Distribution
Industrial warehouse and distribution building for Amazon.
Warehousing & Distribution buildings are very large, single-story structures used primarily for warehousing and the distribution of business inventory. These buildings range from 5,000 to hundreds of thousands of square feet under roof and have up to 60-foot ceiling heights to accommodate extensive racking and storage systems. These buildings may have a small amount of office space as numerous loading docks, truck doors and large surface parking lots to semi-trailers. Some buildings may be served by rail cars.
Manufacturing
Industrial food manufacturing building producing meals for delivery in Downtown Los Angeles
Manufacturing facilities (also called heavy industrial buildings) are designed to house specialized equipment used to produce goods or materials. In addition to providing three-phase high capacity, electric power, these industrial properties may include heavy ductwork, pressurized air or water lines, buss ducts, high capacity ventilation and exhaust systems, floor drains, storage tanks and cranes. A subset of this is food manufacturing which often includes refrigeration, clarifiers, boilers, sloped floors for drainage, and other specialized food facility equipment.
Refrigeration/Cold Storage
Lineage Cold Storage, Vernon, CA
Refrigeration/Cold Storage are specialized industrial buildings that offer large capacity cold storage such as cooler (34 deg F) and freezer (-10 to 0 deg F) rooms. They are often used as a distribution center for food products such as meat, produce, prepared meals, dairy, etc…
Flex or Showroom
Media Centre Drive
This versatile building type (short for “Flexible”) covers a broad range of uses and often is used to combine one or more uses in a single facility, including office space, research and development, showroom retail sales, light manufacturing research and development (R&D) and even small warehouse and distribution uses. Because of this versatility, flex buildings are sometimes listed as separate category. Flex buildings typically have ceiling heights under 18 feet and have a higher percentage of office space than larger industrial buildings.
Telecom / Data Hosting Centers
CoreSite Data Center in DTLA
These are highly specialized industrial buildings located in close proximity to major communications trunk lines with access to an extremely large and redundant power supply capable of powering extensive computer servers and telecom switching equipment. These buildings have reinforced floor slabs capable of supporting the weight of the electrical and computer equipment as well as backup generators, and specialized HVAC. They may also include raised flooring to handle cooling and extensive cabling. These buildings may also be called Switching Centers, Cyber Centers, Web Hosting Facilities and Telecom Centers.
R&D (Research and Development)
Google Westside Pavilion in Los Angeles, common open campus that internet tech companies like
Flex buildings are popular in high technology industries such as computers, electronics and biotechnology because they effective support a hybrid of office, manufacturing and warehouse space housed in a single location. Often these types of space users prefer locating in campus-like business parks featuring extensive landscaping, shared architecture design, and lots of surface parking and open space.
Biotech (Wet Lab)
Biotech buildings are highly specialized flex buildings that support a range of laboratory space where chemicals, drugs or other material or biological matter are tested and analyzed. This type of building requires extensive plumbing and water distribution, direct ventilation and specialized piped utilities. In addition, some may offer accurate temperature and humidity controls, dust control, and heavy power. Often these types of buildings are located together in campus-like fashion with extensive landscaping, extensive surface parking and open space.
Soundstages – Film & TV Production Studios
Very high clearance Audio Video Soundstage – film and streaming television production
Soundstages are newly constructed and other times developers retrofit existing industrial buildings. These facilities typically have ceiling heights over 30 feet with concrete tilt up walls along with ancillary offices and a commissary for film crews to eat. They are used for film and television production along with commercials, social media, and product videos.
Los Angeles has 50% of the total square footage of production studios and soundstages in North America. Large clusters are in Hollywood, Burbank, and Downtown L.A. In 2023, demand for studio space to create content outpaces supply and availability.
IOS – Industrial Outdoor Storage
Industrial Outdoor Storage example: truck trailer land site
Industrial Outdoor Storage (IOS) is a land site zoned for an industrial use where the tenant can store items outside, most commonly vehicles, construction equipment, building materials, or containers. Most IOS sites have a small building that is generally used as an office and to store tools / parts required for the tenants’ operations. Typical IOS sites range from 3-10 acres of land with a small warehouse building.
IOS also includes truck terminals, which are specialized, low-coverage industrial facilities designed for the maximum throughput of goods. Truck terminals are cross docked facilities where a long-skinny building resides near the center of the site. Goods are not stored in truck terminals but rather moved from one truck to another in the most efficient manner possible. Less-than-truckload (LTL) third-party logistics operators, which combine multiple customers’ freight on a single truck for at least the long-haul portion of the journey, are large users of truck terminals.
Another common IOS use is truck trailer parking, sales, and leasing. And also equipment rentals.
