David Greek is buying land at a pace Greek Real Estate Partners hasn’t seen in roughly a decade — and he’s doing it in a year when most developers are sitting on their hands.
“This is not an easy time at all to acquire land,” he said. “The pricing is still very up in the air, and there’s a lot of uncertainty around the outlook and the economy and rents.”
Greek, managing partner of the family-run industrial developer, is jumping in.
The firm has closed on two Central Jersey land parcels this year and expects to close on four more within the next 12 months, rebuilding a pipeline as its two flagship industrial parks — in Logan and Linden — wind down to their final buildings.
“We feel that the market is kind of at an inflection point,” Greek said. “I think we’re kind of at the beginning of a new real estate cycle, and the last two years has been the working out of some of the kinks and the pain in the system.”
Greek declined to name the two Central Jersey sites while they’re still moving through entitlements, but he described both as smaller-to-mid-sized redevelopment projects — a deliberate choice. With institutional equity largely chasing stabilized, value-add deals rather than ground-up development, Greek said the firm has focused on projects it can fund without outside capital.
That’s also where the tenant demand has been.
Greek said the market has seen strong activity in the 50,000- to 200,000-square-foot range over the past year, while the 200,000- to 600,000-square-foot segment has been stuck in a nearly two-year lull.
But Greek is now shifting his focus toward the high end. He said the firm is targeting sites capable of supporting 700,000-square-foot to 1 million-square-foot buildings, betting that big-box demand — largely dormant the past two years — is starting to return.
“We’re starting to see some green shoots in the big box category,” he said. “We think that’s probably where the highest demand is in 2027 and 2028.”
The numbers explain the caution that preceded this year’s buying spree.
Greek said New Jersey is delivering less than a third of the industrial square footage it was in 2023, which he pins as the market’s peak, and new industrial applications statewide have fallen sharply along with it. Vacancy has hovered around 7% to 8% for months — well above the 5% threshold Greek said typically has to be crossed before developers start building speculatively again.
He’s projecting the market gets there by year’s end.
Some of today’s vacancy, Greek said, is concentrated in a specific trap: buildings in the 300,000- to 600,000-square-foot range built during the pandemic warehousing boom without the ability to be subdivided. Developers chasing high rents in that window often skipped the flexibility of splitting a building into smaller units — a decision that left some properties, including ones in northern New Jersey, sitting empty for years as demand shifted and sublease space flooded the market.
That sublease glut has since shrunk considerably, Greek said, and with deliveries scarce over the past two years and likely to stay that way through the rest of this one, he expects landlords to gain leverage as tenants run out of options.
Combined with a shrinking runway between when tenants identify a need and when they need space in hand, it’s a setup Greek is comfortable building into.
Told that sounded like the perfect recipe for speculative development, Greek didn’t hesitate.
“Yes,” he said.
For information about Greek Real Estate Partners, go to greekrep.com.
