Prime Location Draws Distributors to Nashville
Published May 19, 2008
What's in a name? Wilson Spoirting Goods opened a 300,000-square-foot distribution center in Wilson County in 2006.
In recent years, corporations such as Federated Department Stores, Wilson Sporting Goods, Gap and Aldi have chosen the Nashville area as a location from which to ship their products. And their ranks continue to grow, with additional companies recognizing the ideal qualities that make Middle Tennessee one of the nation’s leading distribution centers.
The number and sizes of distribution warehouses going up in Nashville and the surrounding counties are made all the more eye-opening by the fact that they’re a relatively recent phenomenon.
“The Nashville market really came into its own (as a distribution center) in the late 1990s,” says David McGahren, industrial division leader with the commercial real estate firm Colliers Turley Martin Tucker. “Up to that point, we were a good distribution center that was driven by the automotive supply business. But we had problems growing the distribution business because we didn’t have the product that a modern warehouse business required.”
Size mattered, in other words. A typical large warehouse in Nashville 12 years ago was around 200,000 square feet with a 24-foot interior height, yet companies were seeking buildings from 500,000 to a million square feet with 32-foot heights.
“When companies looked at Nashville,” McGahren says, “they loved our transportation and looked very favorably at our educated workforce and our quality of life. But they couldn’t find the building (they required) and would go someplace else.
“Around 1997, we started to see ‘spec’ development occur for those larger buildings, and we saw as those types of buildings started going up they were getting leased. All of a sudden Nashville was on the map as a major distribution center. It took some developers that had some guts to be a little bit of a pioneer.”
Federated Department Stores Inc. operates a 500,000-square-foot distribution center in the Kentucky/Tennessee Industrial Park near Portland, about 40 miles north of Nashville. Because of its positive impact on the region, the new facility was honored by Trade Industry & Development magazine with its 2007 Corporate Investment and Community Impact Award.
Merchandise orders fulfilled are for such stores as Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s.
Other notable companies that have chosen the Nashville area as a distribution point include DK Publishing, Hot Topic and Cinram International.
Story by John McBryde
Photo by Brian McCord
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