For Steven McCraney, industrial is the new retail.
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As McCraney Property Co pares its legacy properties from its portfolio, its founding father tells us the firm is embarking on further big-box distribution center developments for the burgeoning e-commerce industry.
“My strategy is that warehouse is the new retail,” Steven tells us. “We believe the future is coming at us so quickly. We see the horizon continuing very strong for industrial products.”
Steven is shown above right with Edgar C. Jones Jr., past Orange Bowl president.
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His argument has sound reasoning. Since the early 2000s, online retail sales have been climbing steadily against overall US retail sales. Just this past quarter, online retail tallied $97.3B in sales, a 4.5% jump from the first quarter and up 15.8% from the same period last year, according to the US Census Bureau.
Steven says everything from people's shirts and shoes to housewares are being bought online today.
“And it's probably not coming from a store," he says. "It's coming from a warehouse somewhere.”
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To that end, Steven has begun selling his firm's legacy shallow bay warehouse stock. Most recently, McCraney unloaded six properties at Orlando Central Park totaling 186k SF for nearly $10M, including 2003 Viscount Row (above) and 1900, 2150 and 2075 Premier Row.
In turn, McCraney has been embarking on a spec big-box warehouse development spree, having built some 5M SF, including 1.3M SF this year, and another 1.2M SF underway in South and Central Florida. Last year, he inked his first deal at the second phase of Bent Oak Industrial Park with Freeman Expositions in Orlando.
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