A room full of IOS operators, five miles from a port that moves roughly 31% of the country's containerized imports, and most of the questions were still about Florida and Texas.
I was in Long Beach yesterday for IMN's Industrial Outdoor Storage conference, sitting on a panel specifically about California IOS. Here's what stood out.
1. The buzz is real, and it is not about California.
Every hallway conversation, every panel that wasn't mine, circled the same map: Dallas, Houston, Tampa, Atlanta. Cheap land, fast entitlements, a growth story investors can underwrite in an afternoon. IOS has fully arrived as an institutional asset class. It has just mostly arrived somewhere else.
2. The room still treats California as a risk instead of a moat.
The questions I got on the CA panel were almost all versions of the same thing: how do you deal with CEQA, how do you get anything entitled, isn't the regulatory environment just a headache? All true. None of it is the risk people think it is. It is the reason existing yards in this state do not get replaced. Every operator asking "how do you deal with the friction" was describing the moat and calling it a problem.
3. Being the niche panel was the actual advantage.
Our panel was a fraction of the size of the national IOS session. That's not a knock on the conference, it's just where the capital's attention currently sits. But less attention on California IOS means less competition for the deals that do work here, from the investors who actually understand the constraints instead of getting scared off by them.
4. Location mattered more than any slide.
We were doing this panel five miles from the Port of Long Beach, which along with the Port of LA moves roughly 31% of U.S. containerized imports. You could not build a more literal argument for why this land matters. Every trailer staging yard and equipment lot in a 20 mile radius exists because of that port, and almost none of it can be replaced.
IOS is having its moment nationally. California is still waiting for investors to notice it's having a bigger one.
Grateful to IMN for having me on the panel and thanks to our moderator Sasha Bernier and co-panelists Alex Olshansky, Brett Gomes, and Blair M. Duncan, Jr..
