The old Charming Shoppes headquarters in Bensalem — a township bordering northeast Philadelphia — is now an Amazon warehouse. A former Bank of New York Mellon back office in King of Prussia is making a similar transition. And the building housing Oldies.com, a pop-music shrine viewable from the Blue Route in West Conshohocken, is also being marketed as a warehouse site.
Even as the pandemic eases, Americans' mass movement towards working and consuming from home has upended demand for business properties, making warehouses more valuable than suburban offices.
"Land for offices used to be worth two to three times properties you could use to support a warehouse. Now it's flipped, and the land under industrial buildings is worth two to three times what it's worth for an office building," said Robert Fahey, head of the Philadelphia group that sells commercial real estate to investors in the mid-Atlantic states for CBRE, the largest U.S. business property broker.
