By Joshua Burd
Far from household names, operators like YunExpress and Elogistek have found themselves in the right place at the right time when it comes to New Jersey’s industrial market.
The companies, both based in China, are part of a wave of Asia-based third-party logistics firms that have leased large blocks of warehouse space in the Garden State over the past 24 months. That’s been critical for many landlords, creating new demand and helping to fill excess inventory after a recent surge in speculative construction.
How those firms will be impacted by outsized tariffs and the U.S. trade war with China remains to seen, but developers are optimistic about what is now an established class of tenants.
“With the pullback in the market, they’ve certainly filled that vacuum,” said Clark Machemer, senior managing director with Crow Holdings Development and the builder of a new industrial park in Carteret that has attracted two China-based logistics firms since late 2023.
“Just like any 3PL, there’s a lot of diversity in how they operate and what they do,” he added. “But with the ones we’ve been seeing, they’ve established their manufacturing networks across Asia and specifically in China … and the 3PLs become the conduits into the U.S. market.”
According to Machemer and other market participants, Asia-based logistics firms “weren’t really on folks’ radars” until about late 2022 or 2023. That’s when major ecommerce players and retailers hit pause on the large leases they were signing at a record pace during the pandemic-fueled peak, forcing landlords to consider tenants that were less familiar, often with limited operating histories and weaker credit profiles.
That opened the door for offshore 3PLs to plant a flag in New Jersey in 2024, according to JLL, when the group accounted for some 8 million square feet or 41.6 percent of all Class A industrial leasing in the state. Admittedly, that pace slowed in the first half of 2025 — with Asia-based firms leasing around 1.7 million square feet through midyear — yet JLL notes that they’re still among the most active tenants, accounting for about 22 percent of all Class A deals in Q2, thanks in part to a renewed push to secure space.
“It’s picked up again, and obviously a lot of that has to do with the tariffs and the uncertainty,” said David Knee, a vice chair of JLL’s Northeast industrial practice. “A lot of things are uncertain at the moment, so people are trying to get as many goods as they can to the marketplace before something were to transpire from the tariff side.”
Notable deals this year have included a 480,844-square-foot sublease by Elogistek and a 332,635-square-foot commitment by HYTX Logistics, both at the 4 million-square-foot Linden Logistics Center developed by Advance Realty Investors and Greek Real Estate Partners. Those followed deals by Weida Freight System and YunExpress at 400 Salt Meadow Road in Carteret, where they occupy a combined 334,000 square feet at the new 1.2 million-square-foot project by Crow Holdings Development, among several others.
That demand has bolstered a region that has seen preleasing plummet, with new construction flooding the market and with many companies now balking at large capital investments in new facilities. To that end, New Jersey had 9.6 million square feet of new industrial space under construction at midyear, according to Knee, but just 26 percent of it was preleased. That’s down from roughly 80 percent around two years ago, when the construction pipeline was significantly higher, with deliveries now expected to tail off as landlords work off the excess supply.
“We’ve been seeing these proposals for probably over three years at this point,” said David Greek, managing partner of Greek Real Estate Partners, referring to Asia-based 3PLs. “But they really haven’t hit the comp sheets until last year because not many of them were actually able to lease space when the market was a lot tighter.”
According to Knee, Burlington County was among the first submarkets to attract the offshore operators in earnest, with its larger blocks of vacant space and more modest rents than northern New Jersey. The firms then moved up the New Jersey Turnpike after the segment had established itself and as buildings became available, he said, and “the landlords started to take a second look at the viability of doing business with them,” leading to deals in more port-proximate submarkets such as Carteret and Linden.
That’s allowed landlords to better understand their business models, which they say have many similarities to U.S.- and European-based 3PLs. One major difference, Machemer said, is that the operators seem more willing to take space speculatively without having a contract in place. “And in some cases that’s because they have to demonstrate to the manufacturer in Asia that they have the space to move the product into.”
There’s also diversity in the operating models, which is on display at the Crow Holdings at Carteret campus. Of the firm’s two tenants at 400 Salt Meadow Road, one is “more of a fulfillment or last-mile” operation, Machemer said, while the other is a more traditional service that brings product into the country and handles logistics for third-party clients.
Greek, meantime, noted that some of the firms have been busing their labor force to New Jersey from pockets of Queens, where there are large East Asian populations. That means that Burlington is the farthest south that many of the operators will look, he said, especially with most of their product coming through Port Newark-Elizabeth.
The deals have not been without challenges, especially with those firms that are new to the U.S. or to the East Coast. That’s made all the more complicated by a lack of credit and operating history, which would give developers pause in a more landlord-friendly market.
“For the newer operating companies, the startups and the ones signing leases for the first time, often there is not really any clarity on what their business model is or who their clients are,” Greek said. “Sometimes they’ll have an account that they’re responsible for distributing for from China, but they’re signing leases that are much, much larger than that single account requires and kind of betting on their own ability to win more business once they secure the space.”
Others have strategies that landlord are more accustomed to seeing, he said, with clients in hand to fill the space immediately and “more of an operating history, more of a credit presence.” That diversity is “not that dissimilar from domestic 3PLs,” Greek added, but the language barrier with Asia-based operators can make it more difficult “to understand what they’re doing and what they intend to do. And often, the clients behind them are companies that we’re not familiar with, either because they are Chinese manufacturers or goods distributors from Asia that just don’t have a presence here in any meaningful way.”
There’s also the task of analyzing an offshore tenant’s financial position.
“With any foreign company, it’s a lot more difficult to really get comfortable with financial statements,” Greek said, noting that GREP has asked some Asia-based tenants for credit statements “and they’ve come in a lot of different forms. We’ve had to learn a little bit about how other people do their accounting.”
The operators are poised to be major players in New Jersey in the months ahead, despite looming uncertainty about President Trump’s sweeping tariff program and the ongoing trade war with China. For one thing, Knee said the fundamentals are still strong with rents still above pre-COVID levels. And landlords “are doing what they need to do” to fill space,” he said, setting the stage for the market to tighten later this year.
Greek also disputed the idea that tariffs in any form will cut off the flow of goods from China to the U.S., as some may fear. The firm’s experience with Asia-based 3PLs suggests otherwise.
“Our conversations with these tenants have been much different,” he said, calling it “much more of a sliding scale, where certain levels of tariffs will impact the amount of business they can bring into the U.S. They can bring the most business into the U.S. with no tariffs at all, but if tariffs are 10 percent or 20 percent or 30 or 50 percent, there’s still a level of business that will occur there — and it’s a meaningful level of business.”
