News
Dermody Properties Steps Up its Pace with U.S. Projects
by John Seelmeyer, Editor, Northern Nevada Business Weekly
After sitting on the sidelines with the Great Recession played itself out, Dermody Properties is back in the game in a big way.
The Reno-based developer of industrial properties – most of them intended for distribution operations – last week said it's starting construction on a 750,000-square-foot distribution center near Philadelphia.
It's the second major project announced in this month alone by Dermody Properties, which has undertaken construction of more than 3 million square feet of industrial projects in size markets nationwide in the past year.
Near its home in northern Nevada, the company is developing a 624,000-square-foot distribution center at Stead.
In early June, Dermody broke ground on a 351,900-square-foot industrial building in the Chicago suburb of McCook, Ill.
That came on the heels of the May groundbreaking on a 315,417-square-foot project near Louisville International Airport in Kentucky.
The company had gotten busy in the northern Kentucky market about a year ago with construction of a 624,000-square-foot industrial development at Shepherdsville.
And in central Pennsylvania, Dermody Properties is working to lease a 1.3 million-square-foot project – 700,000 square feet of existing space, 602,000 square feet on the drawing board – in a distribution center that's within a one-day drive of 40 percent of the American population.
There's no secret about the factors driving the company's busy schedule of development. As demand from potential tenants dried up during the recession, developers and the financial companies that provide their capital headed for the sidelines.
Demand for space rebounded with the economic recovery, few new distribution centers had been built in key markets, and developers no can command the rents that allow new projects to pencil out.
“We're having a nice run,” acknowledges Douglas Kiersey Jr., president of Dermody Properties. “Customer demand has returned, and there has been limited supply. We think these conditions are going to persist for a period of time.”