What Are The Various Types Of Niche Industrial Real Estate Properties?

The following Q&A was completed as part of our conversational Commercial Real Estate FAQ Interview Series, we hope you find it helpful.

When investing in industrial real estate properties, there’s plenty of niche spaces to work in with your investments. Distribution buildings, indoor recreation, and self-storage are just a few of the niche areas where investors are finding a great deal of success in the world today and going forward. One could develop a diversified portfolio working in industrial type spaces alone. 

Richard Wilson: What are the various types of niche industrial real estate properties? Maybe there’s a couple types that people didn’t even know exist if they don’t work…

Robert Borris: That’s a really good question because it’s becoming more and more fragmented into smaller and smaller subgroups. So there are, the area of real estate I’m most focused in are distribution buildings. Buildings that Amazon can rent, or an Amazon type company can rent, where they bring in goods from somewhere else, they store them, they rack them, and they distribute them to smaller users or even directly to the consumer. But there’s also, there’s now becoming subgroups like refrigerated warehouses are now becoming a sub-market, there’s a market now in mini self-storage facilities that investors are investing in, they’re just buying mini self-storage. There’s a very strong institutional investment community to speak of of data centers, especially around here in Northern Virginia. They’re a very very big business. There’s retail warehouses where they’re kind of like shopping things but they’re not shopping centers. Even recreation facilities are now warehouse focused – indoor sports cars, indoor badminton, indoor volley ball, indoor swimming, I mean all that stuff, these are all warehouses. And what I’m focused in on is a warehouse genre which is the most flexible you can get. So anything from storing Oreo cookies to playing – in one of my facilities we just leased 40,000 square feet to an indoor batting cage guy. This is just phenomenal, believe it or not. But, it’s the ability of choices and the ability to have lots options where you can rent this stuff out. 

Richard: Great, sure.