Today's Big Building Tour

We hopped the Disney Cruise Line bus this afternoon to tour Southridge Commerce Park, an international TOBY winner. For those of you hoping to win tonight, does the inside of your property look like this?

Southridge has 12 buildings ranging from 40k to 404k SF (the largest building in developer EastGroup’s portfolio nationwide) and was constructed over the last nine years. Senior property manager Luci Smith (in pink with sunglasses) tells us she tries to make it feel more like an office park, with perks like food trucks and ice cream socials. Tenants clearly love it; the park is 100% occupied. With our intrepid fellow tourers (pictured), we saw two ends of the industrial buildout spectrum.

First we visited that 404k SF behemoth, where EastGroup SVP of development John Colemen and facility managers Mike Gauthier and Eric Nitche showed us around. The facility houses three tenants, with United Stationers taking up the bulk. It’s your stereotypical warehouse, without AC and with aisles upon aisles of stored product and conveyor belts prepping items for shipping.

Some cool features: 40’ Big Ass Fans (no, really, that’s what they’re called) that keep air circulating, electrified receivers on the floor that keep forklifts straight between rows to avoid collisions into product, and a 10k SF enclosure for aerosol cans that can bring down fireblock walls to prevent explosions. (Do they make those electrified receivers for the home? A klutz's dream.)

Next we visited Davita RX’s facility, which has the same shell but a very different look thanks to a $5M office-heavy buildout. Nearly half of the 50k SF location is taken up by offices and cubicles for 168 employees, a café (they converted the loading docks into huge windows), a Zen room, and conference facilities. Even the shipping space is air conditioned, and the pharmacy boasts a unique $9M conveyor system that took almost a year to build and install. It can churn out 12,000 prescriptions in eight hours. (Sounds like the conveyor belt may be slipping a few of the amphetamines.)