In the world of commercial real estate investing, verified data and insights go a long way to help investors make more informed and successful business decisions. Bakersfield has historically proved a reliable market for industrial properties, with a steady growth across other asset classes that attracts both investors and brokers to the region. Crexi bridges the gap between the two groups and connects commercial real estate parties to the best opportunities in Bakersfield.
Crexi’s commercial real estate offerings combine powerful broker marketing tools, CRE data insights, and a robust sales and leasing marketplace in a centralized platform.
Buyers and tenants comprise nearly 92% of Crexi’s online traffic and use the search tool to find Bakersfield properties that precisely match their investment interests. Thousands of commercial real estate brokers, too, employ Crexis sales and leasing tools to transact the entire CRE process digitally.
Crexi strives to unify the commercial real estate population in a single online platform where buyers, brokers, lenders, tenants, and principles enjoy a transparent, simplified transaction process. Representing over $200 billion in facilitated transactions and listing 330,000 properties since its 2016 launch, Crexi proudly serves Bakersfield as the nation’s fastest-growing online commercial real estate resource bank and marketplace.
How Crexi Connects Buyers to Bakersfield Properties
Crexi’s marketplace empowers Bakersfield buyers and tenants with a holistic, online platform. Bakersfield has made a name for itself nationally as a hotspot for residential real estate, which likewise draws commercial interests as the population and job opportunities increase in the market. Mainly, Bakersfield serves as California’s logistics hub, thanks to its central location between the port cities of Los Angeles and Oakland.
Buyers, tenants, and sellers can explore hundreds of thousands of properties on Crexi at zero cost. The search feature offers dozens of criteria, allowing principles to narrow down their search by price, square footage, cap rate, asset class, and more to find the perfect investment for their needs.
Interested parties can contact brokers, download OMs, and even submit a letter of intent (LOI) through Crexi’s secure platform.
Intelligence Empowers Investors with Market Knowledge
Crexi’s Intelligence arms investors and tenants with the data and insights they need to make informed commercial real estate decisions. Crexi’s Intelligence offering provides principles access to over 50 MSA reports and sales comparables detailing over 13 million historical sales, verified by third-party and government sources.
Buyers and sellers can access Intelligence on a subscription basis.
How Bakersfield Brokers Win with Crexi
The Bakersfield commercial real estate market shows healthy activity, with over 200 properties for sale and nearly 4000 properties for lease in Kern County listed on Crexi. Bakersfield commercial estate trends towards office and industrial asset classes, with mildly healthy activity in multifamily and retail spaces.
Bakersfield brokers can freely list properties and manage leads using Crexi’s fully equipped lead-management dashboard. Crexi currently empowers brokers in Bakersfield to list a wide range of property types across asset classes, including:
- Office units
- Industrial facilities
- Multifamily units
- Land parcels
- Development sites
- Non-traditional properties, including medical offices, self-storage, etc.
Crexi’s free marketplace allows brokers to manage every step of a CRE transaction online, securely and efficiently. With tools such as lead contact, buyer activity insights, pipeline management, and a due diligence vault, Bakersfield brokers can easily manage listings and close deals. However, Crexi’s real value emerges with the added capabilities of Sale and Lease PRO.
Crexi Sale PRO & Lease PRO
Brokers use Crexi Sale PRO and Lease PRO to access detailed contact information, email marketing analytics, and customized lead reports directly inside their dashboards. As an added marketing value, PRO listings are featured at the top of Crexi search pages and included in Crexi’s weekly email blasts, viewed by thousands of buyers with an average click-through rate of 10-15%.
PRO users also enjoy limitless access to Crexi’s more than 40 million sales comparables and detailed MSA market reports, with 51 available nationwide. Crexi partnered with one of the US’s largest data companies after thoroughly vetting all information via third-party state and local sources.
California brokers — and Bakersfield in particular — champion Crexi’s platform, with nearly 40% of overall listings posted through the PRO subscription. These Bakersfield-based brokers can utilize Crexi Sale PRO and Lease PRO to connect directly with more than 60,000 unique buyer and tenant leads in California, obtaining 4x more prospects in the process. This also includes Crexi’s 430,000 monthly visitors nationwide who look to Bakersfield as a desirable investment and leasing opportunity site.
Bakersfield PRO subscribers also, on average, close six-to-eight more deals than non-PRO users.
The State of CRE in Bakersfield
Centrally located between Los Angeles and Oakland and nestled in “The Valley,” Bakersfield serves as a vibrant regional hub with commercial real estate opportunities and steady growth across asset classes.
Bakersfield Regional Breakdown
Bakersfield is the county seat of Kern County and California’s ninth most populous city, with a community of approximately 365,000. Kern County is California’s third-largest, spanning over 8,000 square miles, and forecasts expect its population to exceed 1.08 million by the end of 2020. Bakersfield alone has grown 18.5% in the last five years and stands as the nation’s 63rd most populated region.
Bakersfield’s unemployment rate currently stands at 7.4%, down from its high of 16% shortly after the Recession. The city has a high population of working millennials, thanks to its desirability in the residential real estate market and growing tech scene and STEM employment.
An average annual salary in Bakersfield of $66,000 and a low cost of living empowers Bakersfield residents with decent spending power, a factor that’s attracted big-box retailers and the retail investors and tenants.
The most recent data shows Kern County experienced a slight decrease in overall GDP (-0.7%) in 2019, due mainly to its reliance on oil, quarrying, and gas extraction. It still experienced a rise in GDP per capita, thanks to lower unemployment rates and the addition of new jobs in other industrial sectors such as STEM and skilled labor.
Bakersfield Industrial Market
Kern County and Bakersfield produce just over 70% of California’s oil production and host 80% of the state’s active oil wells. Nestled in the heart of “The Valley,” Bakersfield also serves as one of the US’s most productive agricultural hubs, producing crops such as cotton, almonds, grapes, and citrus.
Over the last two decades, Bakersfield’s developing infrastructure and close distance to Los Angeles (110 miles) and San Francisco (280 miles) have outfitted the region as a convenient transportation stop for business and trade. An airport, two freight railroads, and the busy Highway 99 and Interstate 5 offer high-trafficked distribution channels with easy access to the rest of the state. As such, industrial properties have seen an uptick in investment and leasing from significant real estate and distribution clients.
In 2019, Bakersfield’s MSA hosted 50 million square feet of industrial inventory, with 70% of the market focusing on logistics products. The arrival of tenants such as Ross Dress for Less, FedEx Ground, Ikea, and Target, among others, has kept vacancy rates low in recent years, most recently at 3.8% compared to the national average of 4.2% in 2019. To that end, a decent amount of the approximately 7,000 acres of land acquired by residential developers may be converted back to industrial use.
The higher demand for industrial properties have triggered a 6.4% increase in average rent from 2018 to 2019, compared to Bakersfield’s historical increase of 5.5% year over year. Regular, modest development keeps the pace of supply and demand in lockstep, so investors can expect to see consistent growth returns in Bakersfield’s industrial sector.
Learn more about industrial properties in Bakersfield here.
Bakersfield Office Market
The Office asset class in Bakersfield has seen healthy activity in recent years, with low vacancy rates in the single digits as of 2019, most recently 5.34%. Healthcare facilities and financial services lead the demand in the sector, with limited construction keeping supply and demand surges mild.
Higher rates of population growth translate to a larger labor force, which in turn is a draw for STEM and tech industries slowly growing in the region. However, construction in 2019 was limited when compared to other asset classes. Rent hit an average of $2.02 per square foot by the close of 2019.
Learn more about office properties in Bakersfield here.
Bakersfield Retail Market
The Bakersfield metro has seen a healthy market for retail commercial real estate, despite nationwide shuttering of stores in the face of increased online shopping.
Learn more about retail properties in Bakersfield here.
Bakersfield Multifamily Market
Per NAR research, Bakersfield is an attractive home-buying destination for millennials as one of the most affordable metros in the state. The region is home to 28% of millennials and attracts 67% of California arrivals – which is good news for multifamily investments as research shows millennials prefer to rent rather than own property.
Mid-2019 vacancy rates settled at approximately 2% — however, high regulatory and construction costs have stunted the development of new properties in the area. This, surprisingly, has attracted investor attention in the current market, and it shows: the average per-unit price of Bakersfield multifamily properties climbed 17.8% from 2018 to an average price of $89,670, up from 16.12% in 2017.
Still, investors can expect a rise in value over time, especially compared to Los Angeles and Bay Area markets. In an interview with online publication Bakersfield.com, Mark A. Thurston of ASU Commercial said, “The Central Valley is the last place you can get cash flow in California.” While not as high as in 2011 (10.69), the 2018 overall cap rate for multifamily housing in Bakersfield clocked in at 5.86.
Learn more about multifamily properties in Bakersfield here.
Contact support@crexi.com to learn more about Sales PRO and Lease PRO.
