Dive Brief:
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The hottest commercial real estate this year might be warehouses.
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Warehouse and light industrial sales increased 38% in the first three months of 2015 when compared with the same timeframe last year, according to CoStar Group’s First-Quarter 2015 Industrial Real Estate Review and Outlook.
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A single, $8.1 billion transaction earlier this year helped push the sector to the top of the commercial real estate heap, CoStar reported. In addition, more than $123 billion in offices, apartments, retail space and hotels, including $20 billion in industrial properties, were sold in the first quarter.
Dive Insight:
It's rare for functional warehouses and light-industrial buildings to outsell office buildings and high-rise apartment buildings. Foreign investors are increasingly buying U.S. real estate, and are attracted to low vacancy rates in those buildings despite rising rents.
"There’s a ton of capital interested in the space and we don’t see any sign of that slowing down," CoStar Group senior real estate economist Shaw Lupton said in the report.