Inside Industrial: Kansas City’s Build-to-Suit Wave

Kansas City’s industrial market has seen a meaningful share of new deliveries translate directly into occupancy, with build-to-suit activity playing an outsized role in recent absorption.In the third episode of Inside Industrial, JLL’s Kevin Wilkerson and Phil Algrim joined CPE’s Diana Firtea to discuss how disciplined development, competition for sites and power availability are influencing Kansas City’s next phase of industrial growth.Wilkerson pointed to a string of large build-to-suit deliveries completed over the last 12 to 18 months, including projects for Ace, Amazon, Church & Dwight, Blue Buffalo, McKesson and Pimco Bakeries.The guests also noted that speculative development has remained disciplined, with a limited pool of active developers and rising competition for development-ready land. They described how data center demand has pushed some land pricing above levels that industrial projects can underwrite, adding another variable for developers trying to pencil new starts.On feasibility, they cited Kansas City’s strong electrical grid for traditional industrial uses, but said power constraints become more complex for manufacturing and data center projects, where Evergy’s energy study process can add meaningful cost and time early in site selection.