Today we're recapping insights from Andy Ashby, commercial real estate reporter at The Daily Memphian, who joined host Mary Cashiola on The AM/DM to talk through the rise of Industrial Outdoor Storage in the Memphis market. It's a smaller market than the ones we usually cover here, but the same dynamics are showing up.
IOS NEWS AND RELATED
The AM/DM Conversation with Andy Ashby
Industrial outdoor storage has been showing up more and more in Memphis industrial reports, and Ashby's reporting on the trend prompted a closer look at why. In the conversation, Ashby walked through what IOS actually is, why Memphis is positioned to benefit, and what's driving demand right now.
IOS Isn't Just a Parking Lot
Ashby pushed back early on the idea that IOS is just open land for vehicles. It can be, sometimes, but the actual use varies: staging shipping containers, storing heavy equipment, housing a trucking company's fleet between repairs. What makes a site IOS has more to do with how it's built out than what's sitting on it: fenced, paved, secured, often with someone on-site.
Most of these properties have been around Memphis for decades under small, mom-and-pop ownership. A guy owns some land, uses part of it for his business, maybe lets a friend park a boat there. What's changed is who's buying them now. As institutional capital from bigger markets has moved in, owners have had to upgrade the sites to handle larger operations instead of just fencing off a lot and calling it done.
Memphis Punches Above Its Weight in Industrial
Ashby's read is that IOS is really just an offshoot of something bigger: Memphis "outkicks its coverage" in industrial real estate. Office and retail here perform about like you'd expect for a city this size. Industrial doesn't. Memphis competes with markets several times its size, thanks to rail, highway, the Mississippi River, and Memphis International Airport, which is the second-busiest cargo airport in the world.
That same infrastructure is why IOS demand shows up here too. As distribution operations scale up, so does the need for outdoor storage to go with them.
E-Commerce Growth Created a "Waiting Room" Problem
The sharpest growth in IOS demand traces back to 2021 through 2023, driven mostly by e-commerce and the push online that COVID accelerated. Amazon runs four large fulfillment centers in the Memphis MSA, and containers need somewhere to sit before they reach a warehouse for last-mile processing.
Ashby's explanation for why this became a real category: developers used to maximize building coverage on industrial sites and didn't think much about truck parking. When operations backed up, there was nowhere for trucks to wait. IOS sites filled that gap, working as a kind of waiting room that keeps the rest of the chain moving. There's an economic logic underneath it too. You can charge for enclosed, rentable square footage. You can't really charge for open yard, the same way a house's porch doesn't count toward its listed square footage. That's part of why building coverage got prioritized over parking for so long.
Other Signals Worth Watching
A couple other items from Ashby's beat point the same direction. Perdomo Worldwide picked up a 50-acre site left behind by a fire at PMC Biogenics and plans to remediate and redevelop it. And Hillwood broke ground on a 1.1 million-square-foot speculative industrial building in Marshall County, built with no signed tenant, a bet that demand keeps showing up.
YardDogs Take
Memphis doesn't need to be a coastal gateway market for IOS demand to show up. It follows wherever distribution infrastructure is already dense, and Memphis has about as dense a multimodal base (river, rail, highway, air cargo) as any inland market in the country. That's generating the same truck-parking and staging bottlenecks driving IOS demand everywhere else.
Ownership here is still mostly small and local, which is usually the setup right before outside capital moves in. The 2021-2023 e-commerce surge has cooled, but it hasn't reversed, and the greenfield industrial activity (Marshall County, the Hillwood spec building) suggests the underlying growth story is still intact. Markets that outkick their coverage in industrial are worth a second look for IOS specifically. The same forces that make a market punch above its weight in big-box distribution tend to do the same for IOS.
Just scratched the surface here. Listen to the full episode here.
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