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"Today's users are focused on leasing facilities with ample parking and outdoor storage, all because of the evolution of logistics, the increase in port volumes in recent years, and the significant need for container storage, trailer storage, and support in and around America’s busiest ports. Of course, Seattle/Tacoma is one of those leading port markets."
- Bob Andrews, Senior Vice President of Asset Management in the West Region
Read what Bob had to say about how CenterPoint’s parking-and-outdoor storage-rich assets in Seattle and across the country are helping shippers and retailers reshape their supply chains.
By Shawna De La Rosa, Alex Halverson and Marissa Nall
Each night around sundown long-haul truck drivers around the Puget Sound region start pulling over into weigh stations, rest stops or wherever a spot can be found along the highway. They are all vying for one of the few parking spaces that can accommodate an 18-wheel semi-tractor trailer.
“There is simply nowhere to park,” Cliff Bates says. “And the problem is exacerbated in an area like the city of Seattle. In the city limits, there are no truck stops. The nearest ones are in North Bend, Marysville and a small one near Tacoma. Between the three of them there is not enough space to handle the truck capacity.”
Bates is the president of Nelson Trucking Co., which closed in 2022, and he is intimately aware of the parking problems truck drivers face. A 2016 report by the American Transportation Institute showed that truckers spent an average of 56 minutes a day looking for parking. And the parking problem today is only getting worse.
More than 160 million tons of truck cargo worth over $313 billion in cargo made its way across Puget Sound-area thoroughfares in 2022. By 2030, those numbers are expected to increase by about 17% to 187 million tons with a value of about $393 billion, according to the Washington State Department of Commerce.
Parking has become such a significant issue for truckers that it is now its own class of commercial real estate investments, says Bob Andrews, CenterPoint Properties’ senior vice president of asset management for the West Region.
“It’s a whole new product type,” Andrews says. “It’s fairly new over the last couple of years, but we’ve been investing it in for a long time.”
One of CenterPoint’s recent local acquisitions is a 19.5-acre industrial yard in Seattle’s South Park neighborhood for nearly $76 million in late September. A few months earlier CenterPoint paid $14.2 million for an industrial property in Kent. Much of its value was in the outdoor storage and parking space that can be utilized by port users and trucking companies.
About CenterPoint Properties
CenterPoint is an industrial real estate company made up of dedicated thinkers, innovators and leaders with the creativity and know-how to tackle the industry’s toughest challenges. And it’s those kinds of problems — the delicate, the complex, the seemingly impossible — that we relish most. Because with an agile team, substantial access to capital and industry-leading expertise, those are exactly the kinds of problems we’re built to solve. For more information on CenterPoint Properties, follow us on LinkedIn. For all media inquiries, including requests for interviews with CenterPoint executives, please contact media@centerpoint.com or 630.586.8285.
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