JLL VP Burrows: ‘Nothing surprises me anymore’

Ryan Burrows, vice president with JLL’s Mid-Atlantic Industrial Practice Group, is hardly surprised by the range of tenants interested in moving to Tradepoint Atlantic.

The development is transforming 3,250 acres of land at Sparrows Point into a state-of-the-art logistics park, with 15 million square feet of vertical construction planned, deep-water port frontage, and connections to Class 1 railroads CSX and Norfolk Southern.

At full build-out of the project is expected to produce a $2.9 billion impact on the regional economy, according to a 2016 report from Sage Policy Group, supporting 17,000 direct and indirect jobs.

Burrows, who is helping lead JLL’s efforts to attract businesses to the site, sat down with The Daily Record for an interview last week at the commercial real estate services firm’s offices in downtown Baltimore.

Below is a condensed and lightly-edited piece of our half-hour conversation. A more complete version of our conversation will be posted online and will run in print on Monday.

https://soundcloud.com/the-daily-record-md/jll-vp-burrows-nothing-surprises-me-anymore

Adam Bednar, The Daily Record: Have you had interest from a firm, that’s maybe in a sector that caught you by surprise, and you thought, “I didn’t expect them to be interested in this kind of site,” anything of that nature?

Ryan Burrows, JLL: I’d say, nothing surprises me anymore. Being that you have a deep-water port, a lot of good rail infrastructure with two Class 1 rail lines, CSX and Norfolk Southern, coming in, it is a major differentiator in that you can go after tenants that wouldn’t just land in a typical industrial park.

You are able to condense their supply chain, so that if they wanted to bring in goods to our port and then process them in a building, whether it’s a manufacturing building, or just straight distribution, and they can ship out and can create some efficiencies by shipping out some goods by rail, some by truck, depending on where they’re going, it is a major differentiator.

So you can really expand that potential … prospect base. So you’re really able to go after tenants that wouldn’t typically land in an industrial park down in the (Interstate 95) corridor, for example.