Office rents price image and location. Industrial rents price function, almost embarrassingly directly: what can be stored, moved, and powered inside the box, and what can maneuver outside it. That directness is a gift to underwriting, because it means the building's physical spec sheet is not background information. It is the rent forecast, and reading it correctly is most of the job.
Clear height is the headline spec because warehousing economics run vertical: a user racking product leases cube, not floor, and every additional foot of clear height is inventory capacity on the same footprint. This creates a functional gradient across the market, modern high-clear product at the top, mid-height stock in the middle, low-clear legacy buildings at the bottom, and a building's position on the gradient sets which tenants can even consider it. The gradient is also an aging curve: as the frontier moves up, existing buildings slide down it without changing at all, which is a depreciation the income statement will not show you until a rollover does.
Loading is the second axis and it screens just as hard. Dock-high doors in sufficient count determine whether a distribution user can run their operation; drive-in doors serve the contractor and service tenants that dominate flex; door count per square foot sets throughput. A big, tall box with thin loading is a storage building pretending to be a distribution building, and the pretense ends at the first serious tour. Around the loading, the site has to cooperate: truck court depth, trailer positions, circulation. And inside, power has quietly climbed the priority list, because manufacturers, processors, and increasingly anything with charging or automation ambitions will disqualify a building on amperage before rent is ever discussed.
The underwriting discipline that falls out of this is comp hygiene. Industrial rent comps are only comps within a functional class, and the most common overstatement in industrial pro formas is market rent supported by buildings the subject does not functionally resemble: thirty-two-foot clear comps justifying rent on an eighteen-foot building. Match the spec before trusting the comp, and when a broker package resists telling you the clear height, that is usually the answer. Office finish percentage matters too, especially in flex, where the finished share of each bay moves both the rent and the future TI obligation.
PropCalc™ keeps the industrial spec sheet, clear height, dock and drive-in counts, power, office finish, in the property profile beside the rent roll, so the physical facts and the financial claims stay in one another's company. Which is the point in one sentence: in this asset class, the building is the underwriting, and the model should have to look at it.