Chances are, that pair of jeans you ordered online and several parts of your vehicle’s engine passed through a logistics park.
Logistics parks are properties with numerous warehouses — leased by retailers, manufacturers, assemblers and such to store, assemble and pack goods or perform light manufacturing before shipping those goods out to customers, retailers, fulfillment centers or factories.
Typically close to major highways, airports, rail lines and waterways, these logistics parks form an important link in the supply chain, making shipping more efficient and less effective.
And today, logistics parks, featuring high-quality, Class A warehouses, are springing up all around Alabama.
It’s happening because Alabama has well-connected roads, rail lines, rivers and airports — and lies in the heart of the southeastern market, says Lauren Hyde, executive director of the Alabama Business Intelligence Center of the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama. Consequently, warehouse and industrial building developers see Alabama as an attractive location for logistics parks.
“Just geographically, [Alabama] is well positioned, and the infrastructure that we have is definitely a strength,” Hyde says.
“We have six interstate highways that converge in Alabama. That makes us a one-day drive time from the center of Alabama reaching west to Dallas and Fort Worth, north to Chicago, east to Charleston and south to Fort Lauderdale, which is important when you think about what truck drivers can do legally in one day to reach those important markets,” she says.
“We also have five Class One rail companies here, several intermodal facilities and continued investment in those intermodal facilities,” Hyde says.
One of the newest logistics parks in Alabama is the Regional East Alabama Logistics (REAL) Park, a 700-acre master-planned industrial park in Macon County that sits along the I-85 corridor.
Farpoint Development and Doster Construction announced in 2023 the completed construction of Class A Building 100, at REAL Park. The park lies inside a Qualified Opportunity Zone 10 miles from downtown Auburn.
Farpoint estimates the park is equidistant from the Kia West Point Assembly Plant in West Point, Georgia, and Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Alabama in Montgomery and 200 miles north of the Port of Mobile.
The next year, in 2024, Port Alabama Industrial Center broke ground in Loxley, Baldwin County, for a 902-acre site at the southwest corner of I-10 and Highway 59 with plans for Class A warehouse space for storage and logistics.
In nearby Mobile County last October, developers broke ground on RailPort Logistics Mobile in Theodore. Developers say the site will feature 4.6 million square feet of industrial space that is close to the CSX railroad, less than 13 miles from the Port of Mobile and 11 miles from the Mobile International Airport.
In March of this year, Baldwin Cold Logistics, the newest cold storage facility in Baldwin County, announced plans to develop a $27 million storage facility in Foley.
Baldwin Cold Logistics announced that Phase 1 construction would begin in the second quarter of 2026 and that the building would include freezer storage, cold storage, machine handling equipment storage and office space.
And up north in Limestone County, the Huntsville Logistics Center is open for leasing. Built in 2023, two Class A industrial buildings cover more than 1.04 million square feet on 132 acres. The site is just a mile from I-565, five miles from Huntsville International Airport and three miles from Mazda Toyota Manufacturing USA.
Glenn Richey, the Harbert Eminent Scholar in the Supply Chain Management Department at Auburn University, says the growth of manufacturing and the automotive industry in Alabama necessitated the need for more logistics parks in the state.
“The combination of the massive growth in industries like that, and the growth of capacity at the Port of Mobile really requires a number of different locations around the state where companies can pre-stage things and bring things in and let them rest until they’re ready to be connected with their final location,” Richey says.
Furthermore, Richey says the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent shortages of goods that occurred at the time sparked a greater need for logistics hubs.
“We found out pretty quickly that if one link in the chain fails, for instance, if the ports in China fail, or we have a part of the country that goes on lockdown, then it shuts down the flow of everything else. So, if you have these kinds of backup logistical facilities, you add some contingency planning and flexibility to what is a pretty tight network,” Richey says.
And the number of recent groundbreakings for logistics parks in Alabama is positive news, he says.
“It’s a good sign of what’s going on in our overall economy, and every one of those that gets built adds additional jobs,” Richey says.
And Hyde points to Catalyst, the economic development strategic plan the state rolled out last year that called logistics a priority sector that would enable the success of all other sectors.
In fact, several of state’s newest logistics parks are already finding tenants to occupy spaces in their warehouses and bring jobs to the communities.
Last year, South Alabama Logistics Park near Mobile signed new tenants, Simpson Strong-Tie, a manufacturer of fastening systems, and Veyer, a wholly owned subsidiary of Office Depot that provides ecommerce fulfillment, transportation and omnichannel distribution services for ecommerce and other companies.
And in April, Farpoint Development and Opportunity Alabama (OPAL) announced that South Korean manufacturer Samkwang Co. had signed a lease agreement for the 168,000-square-foot Building 100 at the REAL Park.
Samkwang plans to use the building to produce injection, paint and assembly-based components for its global customers as well as create local jobs and train a skilled workforce, according to a company announcement in March 2025.
“They found that our location was strategically located, equidistant to the Hyundai manufacturing facility in Montgomery, as well as Kia’s manufacturing facility in West Point, Georgia.,” says Justin Patwin, a principal with Chicago-based Farpoint.
“Now we’re focused on phase two, which will be much larger in scale and include more potential buildings out there,” Patwin says.
In Baldwin County, Lee Lawson, president and CEO of the Baldwin County Economic Development Alliance, says, “There hasn’t been a lot of new space built in our market. There’s been some around the Port of Mobile, but honestly, not a whole lot else in the region.
“And we see the driving demand, both from not only the grocery industry, but also the restaurant industry, and serving our regional market with the refrigerated frozen product is important to the supply chain down here,” Lawson says.
And at the Port Alabama Industrial Center, phase one construction on the site will begin soon, which will include the first structure, a 300,000-square-foot, Class A spec building, Lawson says.
“There’s a lot of tenant demand in our marketplace for that kind of space,” says Lawson, “and not a lot of that space being built in our market. So those discussions are ongoing, and we expect, hopefully, to have some tenant news before the building is ever finalized.”
Patwin says that for his company, Farpoint Development, interest in leasing rose after the November elections.
“What we saw last year was that leasing was dead. No one seemed to want to make a big decision before the election,” says Patwin. “It was slow all last year.”
“But now, leasing activity has picked up everywhere.”
Gail Allyn Short is a Birmingham-based freelance contributor to Business Alabama.
This article appears in the June 2025 issue of Business Alabama.
