Consensus in the offing

The Warsaw Research Forum's pooled resources may have produced some agreement over the classification of office space in the capital but haven't as yet achieved this for warehouses. For offices, location for example, is deemed a crucial factor when determining their status; for warehouses, this is not so straightforward. The very definition of 'logistics' means of course that 'image' and 'identity' are unlikely to be significant for firms when searching the market for warehouse facilities

In their 2002 report on Warsaw's warehouse market, Cushman & Wakefield H&B, divide the warehouse stock in and around the capital into three zones. The first, which lies just within the city's administrative borders, is where developers have paid close attention to the building's exterior and its immediate environment. The areas leased are generally between 500 to 1,500 sqm for warehouse space and 100 to 500 sqm for offices. Typical tenants include those selling consumer goods such as pharmaceuticals, upmarket alcoholic drinks and cosmetics. Rents here average at around USD 6 sqm for warehouse space.

Zones
In the second zone, properties are located twelve to thirty kilometers from the city centre and service firms who want to create regional or nationwide distribution centres. Both distribution companies and producers of consumer goods such as foodstuffs, beverages and books and paper are typical tenants, occupying areas from between 200 sqm and 10,000 sqm and paying rents of approximately USD 4 sqm.
The third zone consists of properties thirty or more kilometres from the capital and services users of the biggest space: no smaller than 10,000 sqm, for nationwide or pan-European distribution. Most of the tenants are logistics operators, working for large firms in the household appliance, automobile parts and foodstuffs' businesses, paying typical rents of around USD 3.5 sqm.

Location not the issue
This short summary contains within it the reasons why Cushman & Wakefield Healey & Baker have chosen "zoning" rather than "classification" when categorizing warehouse stock. Unlike office space, warehouse rents for one are not influenced by nebulous matters such as prestige and are dictated by raw economics and the utility of the buildings. The report clearly indicates that rents are influenced by location but the location is in turn usually a consequence of end-users' highly specific logistics' requirements. What a firm produces and how it wants to distribute this informs its logistics choices, not the identity it wants to achieve in a particular market. "Location is not an issue for classifying warehouse space," says Bartosz Szewczyk of AIG/Lincoln.

Still waiting
Szewczyk goes on to claim that in the market there is "no clear understanding about what is class A, B or C warehouse space," something that came across patently enough when Eurobuild asked several experts for their thoughts on the issue, though Mathieu Giguere of Cushman & Wakefield Healey & Baker, one of the agencies involved in the Warsaw research Forum, stressed that it was committed to producing the relevant research but would add only that, "we are already advanced in agreeing on the type of developments and zone definitions for example". His own agency's report, (mentioned above), might well provide some clues as to the eventual findings and whilst as yet a rigid hierarchy of warehouse building-types has yet to be constructed, there are at least some broad notions of what the best space can offer. However, any generalizations need to be made whilst bearing in mind the specificity of warehouse end-users' requirements. Indeed one of the trends accepted by most is that more 'built to suit' premises are appearing. "The speculative market is shrinking," says Piotr Wąs of DTZ.