Dermody Properties Breaks Ground on 154-Acre Logistics Park in South Jersey

 By Amber Valentine CoStar Research

Dermody Properties has broke ground on a 154-acre logistics park in South Jersey, a region where industrial space remains in high demand.

The three-building, 1.2 million square-foot logistics park, called LogistiCenter at Woolwich, is located at the intersection of Route 322 and Locke Avenue in Woolwich Township in Gloucester County. Dermody plans to make significant improvements to the intersection in conjunction with the development of the park.

LogistiCenter at Woolwich includes a 262,200-square-foot facility at 2062 U.S. Route 322, a 552,585-square-foot facility at 2120 U.S. Route 322 and a 336,700-square-foot building at 2057 U.S. Route 322. Each building is set to feature a 36- to 40-foot clear height, build-to-suit office space, ESFR fire protection systems, 50 to 110 dock-high doors, drive-in doors and ample trailer and car parking.

The logistics park is less than 2 miles from Interstate 295 and less than 3 miles from Interstate 95. Because of its proximity to Philadelphia and Wilmington, the park's direct highway will give tenants the ability to reach 33% of the U.S. population in a single day's drive and 3 million people within a 40-minute drive, Dermody said in a press release announcing the start of construction.

Demand for industrial space had been skyrocketing, driven by e-commerce, in New Jersey even before the pandemic last year. Stay-at-home orders and store closures at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic gave online buying another boost, and the need for logistics space exploded. But there is scant vacant space available to build such projects in North Jersey, so distribution and warehouses are being constructed farther south in the Garden State.

Gloucester County's industrial vacancy rate is 2.1%. Annual net absorption, which measures the difference between the sum of space tenants physically occupied and the sum of space tenants vacated over the past 12 months, sits at 2.5 million square feet.

"The region continues to attract top-tier companies looking for Class A warehouse space that has become too rare to find or too expensive in Central and Northern New Jersey," Rob Borny, partner at Dermody Properties, said in the press release. "We believe that Southern New Jersey will continue to flourish and we’re extremely grateful that our past success in the region has afforded us the opportunity to grow along with it."

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