What is the Cost to Build a Warehouse?
When new companies outgrow their current workspaces, they look to develop warehouses that expand and streamline their distribution and delivery processes. With rising e-commerce demands, industrial warehouses have become one of the most resilient assets in the real estate industry. Due to the wide range of products produced by companies, warehouses increase logistics efficiency in retail. The warehouses scale shipping processes and ensure product availability with minimal backorders.
Warehouses are large and complex projects, and we will discuss the costs of building a warehouse and how you can effectively maximize the available space.
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Warehouse Cost By Size And Square Feet
The average costs for building a warehouse are $25 per square foot for the shell building. For small warehouses of 40 by 60 ft, the prices can be as low as $160000. However, for big warehouses of about 50000 square feet, the prices shoot up to $3,425,000. The price is affected by the size of the warehouse, type of materials, delivery costs, and construction methods.
Below is a rough estimate of the costs on warehouses based on size and price. We sourced the following data from Strong Building Systems.
| DIMENSIONS | SQUARE FEET | TURNKEY ESTIMATE |
|---|---|---|
| 40×60 | 2,400 | $170,000 |
| 50×60 | 3,000 | $203,500 |
| 50×80 | 4,000 | $62,800 |
| 50×100 | 5,000 | $372,500 |
| 60×100 | 6,000 | $395,000 |
| 80×80 | 6,400 | $450,000 |
| 80×100 | 8,000 | $500,000 |
| 100×100 | 10,000 | $675,000 |
| 100×150 | 15,000 | $977,500 |
| 100×200 | 20,000 | $1,550,000 |
| 100×300 | 30,000 | $2,375,000 |
| 100×400 | 40,000 | $2,700,000 |
| 100×500 | 50,000 | $3,325,000 |
| 100×1,000 | 100,000 | $6,650,000 |
The shell building consisting of a concrete slab base costs about $25 per square foot, whereas the steel building framework from $9 to $14 depending on the gauge of steel used for construction. The costs in the table above are inclusive of land and grading. If one can obtain land and grading for significantly lower prices, it will decrease overall construction costs.
Cost To Consider
Various costs encompass the construction costs of a warehouse. These are hard costs, soft costs, financing costs, and operational costs.
What Impact The Warehouse Building Costs?
The construction of a warehouse is a significant infrastructure investment. One needs to perform careful analysis on various factors that affect warehouse building costs. Some factors that impact warehouse building costs are the type of warehouse, location, and design. Below are some of these considerations.
Initial Considerations
There are initial considerations that have an immediate effect on costs. These are the volume of goods you intend to store in your warehouse, access points to market outlets, accessibility by staff members, and future scalability of the warehouse. The location of your warehouse affects its accessibility to the market, transportation costs of goods, and land acquisition costs.
Scope of Construction
Your project’s scope also affects construction costs. The size of your construction project is one of the most significant factors that drive up construction costs. In an already constructed warehouse, the prospects of expanding scale up the construction costs. The scope of the project is coupled with the complexity of the project. The more the complexity increases, the higher the prices shoot up as the labor and material costs increase.
Use Case of Building
The type of use brings in different designs for efficiency and gives better low-cost alternatives. A common consideration in warehouse design is cold storage. Some distributors and retailers need warehouses with cold storage if they are dealing with perishable goods. Incorporating cold storage leads to manipulations of the basic design as it will be necessary to add more rooms and facilities to accommodate the new designs.
Design Cost
The design team should design a warehouse in a way that fosters a good work environment. With different designs come different types of warehouses. Some warehouses to consider are the humidity-controlled warehouses and the refrigerated warehouses. Either of the warehouses mentioned above increases the material and labor costs as the architectural and engineering costs increase. The design needs to be precise to accommodate these functionalities.
Architectural Design
The complexity of your architectural design increases with the type and volume of goods stored in a warehouse. If one has different kinds of goods with varying storage requirements, building a warehouse with multiple rooms might be necessary to accommodate various storage requirements. This will increase the construction costs as the design and labor costs will increase.
Material Cost
The material costs vary with the type of warehouse and storage. The materials for a cold storage warehouse will cost anywhere between $150 to $170 per square foot, whereas the materials for constructing an average warehouse will be between $50-$65 per square foot.
The material costs also go up depending on the height and quality of construction you need. If you build a high warehouse, the material costs will substantially increase due to larger loads of lower floors
Process To Get Warehouse Cost Estimate Report
Here I am going to share some steps to get your Warehouse Cost estimate report.
