At 1.2M square feet, the region’s largest warehouse lands a tenant

Don’t count out the warehousing industry in the Philly region just yet.

A subsidiary of global logistics giant Maersk will lease the region’s largest warehouse, the 1.2 million-square-foot Box Park Logistics Center in South Jersey even as construction of such massive structures has waned.

The Box Park Logistics Center on Taylors Lane in Cinnaminson, Burlington County, is roughly the size of the Cherry Hill Mall. The owners, Logistics Property Co. LLC, say the building is expandable to 1.5 million square feet, or about the size of an additional average — albeit much smaller — warehouse.

“This project, in size alone, was a tremendous undertaking,” Mark Glagola, a senior vice president at Logistics Property Co., said in the announcement this week. “We are grateful to the teams who worked on the project, including our general contractor, FCL, our brokerage team at Cushman & Wakefield, and Cinnaminson Township.”

The building was built in 2023. It has 40-foot ceilings, 215 dock doors, 216 trailer parking spaces, and 549 parking spaces. It is LEED certified, meaning that it hits certain benchmarks for energy efficiency.

Performance Team, the Maersk company, will lease the building and grounds. Performance Team specializes in operations, transportation, dispatch, and conveyor mechanics.

“This new 1.2 million-square-foot facility in Cinnaminson marks a significant step in strengthening our logistics network in the Northeast,” Jason Walker, head of Maersk Contract Logistics, North America, wrote in an email to The Inquirer. “This location positions us closer to our customers and key transportation corridors, enabling faster, more efficient service while also creating meaningful job opportunities for the local community.”

The lease comes as a recent Cushman & Wakefield report on the first quarter showed that industrial construction, which includes warehousing, peaked in 2023 in the Philadelphia region.

Despite that, the report said that the current vacancy rate remains strong at 9% and that, “leasing activity exhibited notable growth throughout the Philadelphia region,” rising 23% for the quarter.

Burlington County remains the top area county for warehousing. The Cushman & Wakefield report said it has more than 53 million square feet of industrial space.

An Inquirer analysis last year showed the deepest overall concentration of warehousing sprawls across the industrial parks and former farmland of South Jersey, including Burlington and into Philadelphia and its Pennsylvania suburbs.

» READ MORE: An insatiable demand for warehousing

More than 70% of the warehouses, and 85% of combined warehouse space, are clustered within three miles of the major highways that parallel the Delaware River — I-95, I-295, and the New Jersey Turnpike.

The average warehouse is about 300,000 square feet, and some are five times that, although industrial analysts have said the strongest demand for new warehouses is below 200,000 square feet.

The buildings contain everything from toothpaste and clothing to smartphones and appliances. Some of the inventory will eventually land on shoppers’ doorsteps, while other items will end up on store shelves.

Although the Cinnaminson property holds the single biggest warehouse, the Keystone Trade Center in Falls Township, Bucks County, has a collection of three large warehouses each over 1 million square feet each, and collectively totaling more than 3.2 million square feet.

Leases for two of those buildings at Keystone were signed earlier this year, according to Cushman & Wakefield.