Selling a vacant industrial property is a lengthy and oftentimes costly process. It requires knowing the strengths and weaknesses of a property and then ensuring the right purchaser sees it – but before all of that, it requires getting your hands in the dirt.
That is what the Detroit Regional Partnership’s Verified Industrial Properties program, or VIP by DRP, is designed to do. It works with local property owners to assess their properties and then market them directly to out-of-state and international companies looking to locate in North America.
“If you have a site that is 10 plus acres or larger that is zoned industrial in our 11-county region – you need to be in this program,” said Shannon Selby, Vice President of Real Estate at the DRP. “When it comes to site readiness, we’ll do the heavy lifting because we need more development-ready properties to attract more businesses to our region.”
VIP by DRP features more than 80 large sites in the 11-county Detroit Region, and recently added a new element – physical site studies. The DRP has hired civil engineers from five of Michigan’s top firms to conduct physical site studies to verify critical information any buyer needs to know before purchasing a property.
These independent professionals conduct key environmental tests, and infrastructure, utility, water flow, and floodplain assessments that are essential to determining the viability of an industrial property.
“Physical site studies are where we really get into the dirt looking at the strengths and weaknesses of the sites,” said Justin Robinson, Executive Vice President of Economic Development at the DRP. “They are boots on the ground doing site analysis work and testing that would normally take six months or more to complete before a property can be seriously considered for development and sold.”
Once the engineers have completed the physical site study, the results are included in a comprehensive report. Complete with maps, drone footage, information on zoning, and other content – the report was created with input from site selectors who help companies pick properties for expansion projects.
“We literally asked site selectors how they assess prospective sites, and then built a process around those best practices to deliver that information in a comprehensive report,” said Robinson.
One of the most critical elements of the program is that it comes at no charge to the property owner. Backed by grant funding, VIP by DRP contributes up to $216,000 to select sites to expedite their development, market the property, and then help close the deal.
“We pay for the physical site studies. We actually write checks directly to those civil engineering teams, so there’s no financial obligation from the site owner,” said Selby. “We pay for it, we provide the expertise, and then we host the site on our online portal so that our business development team can push it out to site selectors across the country and the world.”
To learn more, visit verifiedindustrialproperties.com.
