I recently had the enjoyment of sitting down with my esteemed colleague and friend, Chad Griffiths, Partner at NAI Commercial, and Gerald Tostowaryk, host of The Real World of Real Estate podcast, to discuss the past year and our upcoming projections for the Alberta industrial real estate market.

Canadian oil and gas production has long since become the scapegoat of the modern energy contradiction.  That is, many around the world are demanding a switch to green, renewable energy, calling for a complete elimination of the oil and gas industry, yet the data shows that global fuel usage from oil continues to grow year after year. 

While the industrial and commercial markets in Alberta have been far from a pretty picture, The North American industrial market as a whole has experienced a record-setting run, registering some of the strongest leasing tallies and tightest market conditions on record.  In particular, the industrial market in the United States, largely due to the huge growth in e-Commerce, has been unstoppable.   

The Butterfly Effect perpetuates that "something as small as the flutter of a butterfly's wing can ultimately cause a typhoon half way around the world" - Chaos Theory.  Although the oil & gas market is more of a behemoth than a butterfly, the trends that it maps out have an enormous ripple effect on nearly all other industries, especially in our "diversified" province of Alberta.  See my latest video where I discuss this effect here...

It's safe to say that we are finally coming out of the trough of this current market cycle.  However, we have been witnessing something interesting happening within our industrial market, particularly between the multi-tenant and single-tenant product classes.  Click here to find out more.