EVERETT — Will future 7E7 suppliers find all the space they need for new facilities close to the Boeing Co.’s assembly plant here?
Perhaps, perhaps not, said Bellevue-based Cushman &Wakefield executive Gary Bullington, who markets properties in Snohomish County.
Bullington’s comments about how the new aircraft project might affect commercial real estate in the county came Tuesday at the end of the Pacific Northwest Aerospace Association’s annual meeting in Lynnwood.
"The question to be answered before you can talk about economic impact is, ‘What are the nature of the facilities the vendors are going to need?’ We know they will need manufacturing and warehousing buildings, but how big and how many? Our inventory of properties and facilities is not particularly large," he said.
Take away the three largest properties on the market — two Boeing buildings in the Bomarc Business Park and one at Goodrich Corp.’s Paine Field site — and the remaining industrial space in south Snohomish County amounts to a vacancy rate of only around 8 percent.
"That’s just about a normal vacancy for industrial areas," Bullington said. "Since most companies probably won’t want the huge space in those three buildings, they will be looking at the remaining space, and there isn’t that much for the kind of demand we may be expecting from those vendors."
The good news is that Seaway Center in southwest Everett has land available for around 600,000 square feet of industrial buildings that could be erected quickly — within a matter of months — by Panatonni, a major developer for 37 acres at the site, Bullington said.
"Seaway Center is master planned, with a ‘smart park’ with fiber-optic networks, so permitting, plan approvals and construction could take place is a matter of months. Building from raw land elsewhere would take at least two years, including permits, and that’s too long to fit the short timetable these vendors will have," he said.
He also sees a great potential need for office space for engineering work, as Boeing is asking its major vendors to design and engineer many of the 7E7 component parts.
"Besides vacancies in two buildings in Quadrant I-5 Center in Lynnwood and some other office buildings, there’s a master-planned smart park — Opus Northpointe — just north of Lynnwood that can provide up to 750,000 square feet of office facilities in just a few months," he said.
One of the key questions though, Bullington said, is whether vendors for the 7E7 will build sections of the plane in other states and ship them to Everett or whether they will want facilities within five to 10 minutes’ driving time of the Boeing plant.
"Where all this subcontracting work is going to be done is yet to be determined," he said, "but it may be that these new tax incentives for Boeing, and also for other aerospace companies, will portray Washington as a much more business-friendly state, friendly enough to attract vendors to locate here."
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