The above chart illustrates how freestanding light industrial properties in Miami-Dade county generally consist of legacy properties. The blue bars indicate the number of properties built in a given year (left axis) with four Miami-Dade non-condo light industrial land use prefixes. Notice there are no bars at the far right? That is not missing data. Those are donuts, and not the kind you eat. Zeros. The grey area is the cumulative square feet of properties with the same land use codes that are more than 100,000 square feet. What we are attempting to illustrate is how smaller industrial property occupancy has transferred to large complexes, as those of us in commercial real estate industry know from day to day experience.
It should be noted that this excludes industrial condos, which are plentiful and likewise became more abundant as freestanding smaller industrial property construction slowed over the years. One can’t interpret this chart as indicating that industrial users have gone from owners to renters given this exclusion of condos, as they are a large segment themselves. Also, a large and unspecified portion of this larger light industrial square footage is occupied by large users, and thus isn’t applicable to the argument. In any case, for those in search of freestanding smaller industrial properties that are reasonably modern, this illustrates what they quickly discover; it is a search for a ghost.