959,579-SF Spec Warehouse Breaks Ground in Columbus's Rickenbacker Area

A partnership led by Trident Capital Group broke ground on a 959,579-square-foot speculative warehouse at 1669 Rohr Road in Columbus's Rickenbacker industrial corridor. The building is due in early 2027, is being built without a signed tenant, and carries a 15-year, 75% property tax break.

What speculative means here

Most large warehouses used to be built only after a company signed a lease. A speculative, or spec, building flips that order — construction starts first, and the owner looks for tenants while the walls go up.

That choice is a bet. It says the owners expect demand to be there by the time the building is done. The group behind it — Trident Capital Group, O'Connor Capital Partners, and Clarion Partners — is making that bet in the Rickenbacker submarket south of the city, as reported by Connect CRE and REBusinessOnline.

The building's specs

The warehouse sits on 57.3 acres, and it will have 40-foot clear ceiling heights, 104 dock doors, 238 trailer parking stalls, and 336 car parking spaces, according to REBusinessOnline. Delivery is targeted for the first quarter of 2027.

Those figures describe a distribution building — the kind used to move goods in and out by truck rather than store them for long. The high ceilings and heavy dock count are built for volume. JLL's Dan Wendorf, Brian Marsh, and Joseph Davis are marketing the building for lease.

A second big building in a growing park

This is the newest phase of the Rickenbacker Industrial Center, a master-planned park designed to reach about 3.67 million square feet across roughly 230 acres, according to CBRE.

The park's first phase — a warehouse of about 1.06 million square feet — was fully leased to ODW Logistics and later sold to the investment firm AEW, per CBRE and REJournals. That the owners moved on to another large building after leasing and selling the first is its own signal about how the corridor is filling.

The site has rail access and sits near Rickenbacker International Airport, the Norfolk Southern Rickenbacker intermodal terminal, and Interstate 270. That mix of air, rail, and highway is why the area south of Columbus has drawn so much warehouse and logistics development in recent years.

The tax break, in plain terms

The project sits in a Qualified Opportunity Zone and carries a 15-year, 75% property tax abatement, according to Connect CRE.

The details matter. An Opportunity Zone is a federal designation that gives investors tax advantages for putting money into areas the government has flagged. The abatement is a separate, local deal: it lets the owner skip most of the property tax on the building's added value for the length of the term. Local governments offer these deals to attract big projects and the jobs they bring.

The trade-off is less public tax revenue in the near term — a live debate across central Ohio as industrial and data-center projects stack up.

What to watch next

The real test for a spec building is leasing. An empty warehouse of nearly a million square feet is a large amount of space to fill, and how fast it signs a tenant will say more about Rickenbacker demand than the groundbreaking does.

CREN has tracked the corridor's activity, including a separate Rickenbacker building sale in July. The next checkpoints here are a lease announcement and a confirmed completion date.