CentralHub Industrial Centers, Inc. (CICI), the industrial leasing subsidiary of DoubleDragon Properties Corp., has broken ground for a 3.9-hectare property in Iloilo as the second site of its industrial warehouse.
The site is strategically located along Iloilo R3 Road, some five kilometers (km) from the Iloilo International Airport and 10 km from the Iloilo City proper.
The newly acquired location is CICI’s second CentralHub complex in the Philippines, following CentralHub-Tarlac. Now under construction, the first phase of CentralHub-Tarlac will be completed and ready for turnover to tenants this July.
Each hub will contain modern standardized multi-use warehouses suited for commissaries, cold storage, light manufacturing, and logistics distribution centers.
CICI envisions becoming a leading provider of industrial warehouses in the Philippines through the development of its first eight CentralHub sites by 2020. Of the eight, two will be located in North Luzon, which include CentralHub-Tarlac; two in South Luzon; two in Visayas, which include CentralHub-Iloilo; and two in Mindanao.
The first eight CentralHub sites are targeted to have an initial 100,000 square meters of built-up leasable industrial space by 2020.
Once fully developed, the first two sites, CentralHub-Tarlac and CentralHub-Iloilo, can contribute about 54,000 square meters or 5.4 hectares of leasable industrial space.
“We believe that the industrial leasing segment presents significant growth opportunities for DoubleDragon as the current market supply is very traditional and fragmented, and with growth now flowing into second- and third-tier cities, demand for industrial space has risen considerably,” DoubleDragon chairman Edgar “Injap” Sia II said.
Today, he noted, there are no large-scale nationwide providers of industrial space, so “similar to our strategy in the expansion of CityMall, we intend to dominate this segment in the near term.”
CityMall Commercial Centers, Inc. a subsidiary of DoubleDragon, owns a chain of community shopping malls, with branches across the Philippines.
“Other than the e-commerce businesses that will soon require facilities such as CentralHub, there are also a lot of synergies within our ecosystem since both our affiliates and the tenants of our CityMalls are the natural users of warehouse facilities as they continue to expand their business to capture the growing consumer base of the Philippines,” Sia added.
Industrial leasing is one of DoubleDragon’s four pillars of growth, the others being provincial retail leasing, office leasing, and hospitality, in line with its vision to be a primarily recurring revenue-focused property company.
