Carson City’s industrial property market apparently recovering

Industry and the economy in the Carson City area are on the rise if industrial vacancy rates, which are dropping, are any indication.

“Basically, the pendulum is swinging from a tenants’ market to an owners’ market,” said Andie Wilson, a commercial real estate broker who puts out a Carson Commercial Scene report with Brad Bonkowski. Bonkowski, a city supervisor, and Wilson are brokers with Coldwell Banker Commercial.

Their summer 2013 report indicates industrial vacancy rates have improved from 21 percent to about 7 percent since 2009, which led them to write about being “in the midst of the Great Recovery.”

Wilson said because business currently is brisk, to say the least, it is unlikely there will be time to update area vacancy-rate figures for Coldwell Banker for a while.

“We’re just too slammed right now,” she said in a telephone interview Thursday from Reno.

She was pumped about both the pace of recovery in industrial properties during the past three years and what it means.

“That’s a huge improvement,” she said of the post-2009 vacancy data. But she said despite the pickup in business, it appears too early in the cycle for industrial construction of any significant quantity.

Bonkowski said that’s the down side of the current market: there is less to show prospective owners as vacancy dwindles. He said data from Mound House, just east of Carson City, shows what is happening.

“We’ve seen the rent concessions going away,” he said, “and the rates are creeping up.”

At the top before the recession, he said, rental rates were about 45 cents per square foot; at the bottom they were 25 cents, and now they are in the 35- to 37-cents range.

In their written report, Wilson and Bonkowski said they are telling customers it is time to buy industrial property, just as they were telling them in 2007 to sell. They also said the improvement is a harbinger of recovery in other economic arenas.

“When the industrial sector recovers first, that means we are creating primary jobs, which means office and retail jobs will follow,” their report said.

The pair also reported that buying industrial property now makes sense because, “barring a major catastrophe (a new war, another terrorist attack on U.S. soil), we can all but guarantee that prices will increase over the coming year, and then continue to increase over the following three to five years.”

The multi-family housing market also is “finally recovering,” their report indicated. It cited the April sale of the 176-unit Parkway Manor apartment complex in Carson City.