Today's modern industrial or office park, complete with strict environmental standards and campus-like setting, is most likely to be built in a western or southern suburban community and located near an interstate highway. At least that's the scenario depicted from the results of site selection handbook's annual survey of office and industrial parks.
In preparation for this year's geo-sites edition, we sent our annual prepared sites survey to the developers, owners, managers and promoters of over 5,000 office and industrial parks. More than 1,000 questionnaires were returned with answers to some 45 questions concerning the park's size, access to transportation facilities, site price, performance standards, zoning, number of facilities and related questions on the location and facilities of their office or industrial park. The survey responses were combined with the results of previous surveys and then subjected to a computer analysis. ...
On the basis of land use, prepared sites zoned for research and development have the highest asking price, $139,500 per acre. In second place are sites zoned for office operations, with an asking price of $107,000 per acre. The sites priced the least are those zoned for heavy manufacturing - $21,000 per acre.
Another interesting difference in price is based on location. Our survey results show that with increasing distance from the interstate there is a steady decline in the average price per acre of prepared sites. For sites less than one mile from the interstate, the average price per acre is $53,000. For sites between one and five miles from the interstate the average asking price drops to $45,000 per acre and for sites between five and 10 miles from the interstate the average price dips to $31,000 per acre.
The same logic, however, does not apply to distance from the airport. Parks closest to the airport have a substantially lower asking price than parks further away. [emphasis added] Our data show that parks located within one mile of the airport have an average asking price of $42,000 per acre, compared to $62,000 per acre for parks five to 10 miles away. In general, the prestige parts of town as well as the prestige business parks are usually some distance from the airport. The noise associated with airports may make land in the vicinity somewhat cheaper. [emphasis added] ...