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Harford County, an exurb northeast of Baltimore, has halted warehouse development for the next 90 days.
County Executive Robert Cassilly signed the bill approving the moratorium on Wednesday, saying the move is to better understand the developments' impact, the Baltimore Business Journal reported. It comes as a blow to a commercial real estate sector struggling with a severe imbalance between supply and demand.
"I would say it's hard to have much more demand than we already have. We don't have supply for the demand we have, for the most part," Chesapeake Real Estate Group principal Jim Lighthizer told Bisnow in February.
Harford County is situated on the Interstate 95 corridor between Baltimore and Philadelphia. In recent years, industrial developers and e-commerce companies like Amazon and Fanatics have flocked to the county to build new warehouses and distribution space.
As a result of its location and availability of properly zoned land, Harford County's attracted a surge of new industrial development in the last decade. Despite a relatively sluggish end to 2022, experts in the industrial sector have said they expect the market for industrial properties, particularly along the I-95 corridor, to fall far short of the supply needed in the area.
During Bisnow's Mid-Atlantic Industrial Summit last month, Danielle Schline, senior vice president at industrial giant Prologis, projected the imbalance between supply to continue for at least the next 12 to 18 months.
"In the Baltimore-Washington corridor this year, there are zero buildings being delivered. Zero," Schline said. "So if we're at 3% vacancy, that's not going to change and rent is going to continue to grow."
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