Another industrial building starts ‘on spec’ in Edgerton

NorthPoint Development believes that “if you build it, they will come.” The Riverside company is constructing a 822,104-square-foot speculative building in Logistics Park Kansas City.

The building, in the Edgerton industrial park that wraps around the BNSF Railway intermodal facilities, doesn’t have a signed tenant yet. But that isn’t expected to be the case for long.

“There’s a huge amount of commerce going on in Edgerton,” said Patrick Robinson, a NorthPoint vice president. “The amount moving through the BNSF system is immense. It’s an opportunity for us.”

Hundreds of people at a recent KC Velocity event heard an expert in automotive industry location services say that the Kansas City area needs more industrial real estate inventory “on the shelf,” ready to efficiently attract more manufacturing suppliers.

But whether a feeder company for the area’s two auto assembly plants figures into the new building isn’t a big worry, according to Robinson. He said the advantage of the adjacent rail-truck hub is a tenant lure for many kinds of operations.

The new building, dubbed InlandPort XIV, will have 36-foot ceiling heights capable of housing an array of industrial cranes and other machinery.

Completion of the building, expected in December, will bring new commercial space in the 1,500-acre Logistics Park to about 3.6 million square feet. NorthPoint’s previously erected spec buildings in the park have been nearly filled.

This story was originally published May 7, 2015 at 11:07 AM with the headline "Another industrial building starts ‘on spec’ in Edgerton."