Pages from the 2018 year-end Lehigh Valley Commerical Real Estate Report.

A standalone edition of the 2018 year-end Lehigh Valley Commercial Real Estate Report is now available.

Each quarter, the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation (LVEDC) releases a quarterly publication providing economic data about the region’s office, industrial, and flex markets.

The Q4 2018 issue, which provides a year-end review of the real estate climate in the Lehigh Valley, was previously only available as part of the LVEDC 2018 Annual Report. But a four-page standalone report is now available in both print and digital formats.

The four-page report was first distributed during the the Greater Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce’s 2019 Commercial Real Estate Outlook on April 11. The digital version can be downloaded here, and hard copies can be made available upon request.

“The Lehigh Valley economic renaissance continues at a remarkable pace,” Don Cunningham, President & CEO of the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation (LVEDC), said in the report.

“What’s happening here in unique,” Cunningham said. “LVEDC tracked 33 major business attraction, expansion, and retention projects in 2018, resulting in the creation of 4,419 new jobs and the retention of 3,006 more.”

The report provides a snapshot of the Lehigh Valley’s industrial market, which included 121.3 million square feet of inventory by the end of 2018. The year brought 4.3 million square feet in industrial deliveries, with another 6.6 million square feet under construction.

This marks the fifth consecutive year that the Lehigh Valley had added 4 million square feet or more of industrial space, according to the report.

The report also highlights the shortage of small-footprint industrial buildings in the Lehigh Valley. In the last three years, only three such buildings in the 40,000 to 80,000 square-foot range have been built, and none were under construction as of 2018.

The Lehigh Valley Commercial Real Estate Report also spotlights the regional office market, which included 27.2 million square-feet of inventory by the end of 2018, with 332,000 square feet of deliveries by year-end and another 523,000 square feet under construction.

Three-quarters of the office space added in the Lehigh Valley in the last five years have been in the region’s cities, according to the report. Out of 1.1 million square-feet of office space developed in the last five years, 851,000 have been located in urban centers.

The report also states that the cost of office space in the Lehigh Valley is significantly lower than other metropolitan areas in the Northeast.

The average asking rent for Class A office space in the Lehigh Valley is $18.61 per square foot, compared to $30.75 in Northern New Jersey, $27.57 in Philadelphia, $36.32 in Northern Virginia, $60.17 in Washington, D.C., and $77.63 in New York City.

The data featured in the Lehigh Valley Commercial Real Estate Report was gathered by George Lewis, LVEDC Director of Research and Analysis. To obtain hard copies, contact Director of Communications Colin McEvoy at cmcevoy@lehighvalley.org or 610-266-3817.