Brennan starts 210,000-square-foot spec industrial north of Nashville

Brennan Investment Group has begun construction on a 210,000-square-foot speculative industrial building on 17 acres in Whites Creek, Tennessee, roughly eight miles north of downtown Nashville — a five-suite bet on the breadth of Nashville's small-bay demand that will not be resolved until the building delivers in the second quarter of 2027. Connect CRE first reported the start.

The rear-load building has a 260-foot depth and can be demised for as many as five tenants, from 27,000 square feet up to the full footprint, and that flexibility is the underwriting: a shell cut five ways leans on the breadth of Nashville's small-bay demand and prices at a wider spread than a single-tenant box of the same size would earn. Brennan is committing capital against tenants it has not yet met.

The site is the company's case. Andrew Mazey, Brennan's senior vice president for the Nashville and Atlanta regions, points to direct access to Interstate 24 and proximity to downtown as the combination that will draw last-mile and regional distribution users, and co-founder and chief investment officer Kevin Brennan calls Nashville a key Sunbelt logistics hub on rapid population growth, rental rate growth and what he calls one of the lowest industrial vacancy rates in the country — a claim about today's market, not the one this building opens into.

The start caps a busy August: Brennan and Grandview sold the fully leased Crossroads Logistics Park in Spartanburg to Invesco for $99.5 million, or about $122 a square foot, after the final suite was signed; Brennan recapitalized the same Moorestown buildings for a third time, taking another liquidity event out of a 94%-leased class B portfolio, and hired a local senior executive to open the Phoenix industrial market. Selling stabilized assets, recapping what it keeps and then deploying into ground-up construction is a deliberate mix — a development book more than a yield book — and Whites Creek is what that mix looks like when a market clears the screen.

Nashville's other property types are working through their own repricing — Pivot paid $55.25 million for the Fifth Third Center downtown and will split the tower between an LXR hotel and Hilton Grand Vacations timeshares — but industrial offers the cleaner entry, at least on paper. Speculative infill in the Sunbelt is the consensus trade of this cycle, which pushes the differentiation into timing, and Whites Creek delivers into a 2027 supply picture nobody has underwritten yet.

The five-suite plan is the part to watch. If absorption holds, Brennan captures small-bay rents across a big-box footprint and the demising flexibility looks like a free option on tenant size; if demand softens before the shell is finished, five suites take longer to fill than one. The first lease signed will tell the story: a single tenant taking all 210,000 square feet would make the five-suite plan moot, while a 27,000-square-foot signing would confirm the granular bet.