McGowan quoted in Philadelphia Business Journal about emerging Northeast Philadelphia logistics market. One of the challenges of the market is that it’s emerging and there isn’t much historical data to benchmark rents and other metrics that go into lease deals especially with new buildings. That has meant that institutional buyers or tenants haven’t flooded the market yet. “There are a couple of pioneers but that is what keeps it on the frontier,” said Kevin McGowan of McGowan Corporate Real Estate Advisors, which focuses on industrial real estate. “If you think about the Lehigh Valley or South Jersey, it’s understood what a 36-foot clear [warehouse] will rent for but here we have just three or four examples. How to do you get a lender to lend on that?” Many of the older sites that are either being redeveloped or razed to make way for new construction are former manufacturing facilities and have environmental challenges, which makes them a little more capital intensive than the cornfields of South Jersey and Lehigh Valley, McGowan said.
