Fulton Industrial real estate heats up

The Fulton Industrial corridor is one of the hottest markets in metro Atlanta for industrial real estate.

Vacancy rates are dropping, rental rates are rising and prospective land buyers are active, all signs of demand that Prado sees as being taken to another level by the announcement last year by United Parcel Service Inc. that it would build a 1.2-million-square-foot hub — its third largest in the country — near Fulton County Airport.

The Atlanta industrial market saw record-breaking positive net absorp­tion of 6.4 million square feet in the first

quarter, a falling vacancy rate and an increase in overall asking rents.

The I-20 /Fulton Industrial submarket dominated absorption to start the year with 2.6 million square feet of overall net absorption, according to the report. Google's move into its 800,000-square-foot data center expansion and Shipper's Warehouse's move into 540,000 square feet of warehouse space, accounted for the majority of positive absorption in the submarket, the report said.

Wilson Covington, a broker with King Industrial Realty who has worked in the Fulton Industrial area for 17 years, stated the UPS hub was vitally important to Atlanta and the Fulton Industrial submarket, but wasn’t the impetus for all industrial activity in the submarket —it's a hot sector across the nation, he said. "Everyone is feeling it," Covington said.The activity in the Fulton Industrial corridor is the highest in 40 years, he said.