With a 400,000 square foot building fully leased and pads for two additional buildings under construction, NorthPoint Development sees a bright future for its newest business park in Kansas City.
Staples will lease 260,000 square feet in NorthPoint’s first speculative industrial building in Northland Park, filling most of a building that already had lease agreements with Ford supplier Delaco Steel Corp. and Pathfinder Systems Inc., a local manufacturer. Now undergoing vertical construction, it is the first of three buildings comprising phase 1 of the 240-acre business park off of MO-210.
"We think the bones of the site are really good,” said Brent Miles, NorthPoint vice president of economic development. "It was a little surprising to us that it hadn't developed faster before our involvement.”
Northland Park is finding success in an area with plenty of land, an intermodal facility and access to the nearby Ford Claycomo plant. When fully developed, the industrial park will include more than 4 million square feet of business space and is expected to employ up to 2,000 workers.
Northland Park is among several large business parks under development throughout the Kansas City region, a commercial real estate trend driven largely by consumers shifting to online shopping. Retailers like Amazon and Staples are increasingly choosing the center of the country for new, sprawling warehouse and distribution centers that can efficiently deliver products to consumers.
"You see a lot of e-commerce in Kansas City because you can get to 85 percent of the U.S. population in a two-day truck drive," said Joe Accurso, senior director at Cushman & Wakefield, the leasing firm for NorthPoint. "To have shovel-ready land that's with an excellent development group that can put together up to 4 million square feet of product within the I-435 loop is pretty special.”
With successful projects at Logistics Park Kansas City in Edgerton, Kan., and Central Industrial Park in Kansas City, Kan.’s Fairfax district, NorthPoint is among the region's most successful big box industrial developers. With the expertise of 15 engineers available to help overcome problems with tenant improvement, the developer prides itself on its ability to create spaces that fill customer needs in a timely manner.
"We have a good flow of capital, which means we can always have a spec development working -- we've always got product," Miles said. "You can't lease a building anymore unless they see something coming out of the ground."