In Wilmington’s commercial real estate market, Will Leonard has become a go-to broker when it comes to buying, selling or leasing industrial space.
Leonard, a senior vice president with Cape Fear Commercial, handles an array of industrial properties, from Wilmington Trade Center’s large-scale tilt-up buildings to smaller-scale flex space properties. Nearly all of his day-to-day work is on the industrial side, Leonard said.
In larger markets like Raleigh or Charlotte, specializing in a specific product type like industrial wouldn’t be unusual, said Chris Norvell, a principal with Wilmington Trade Center developer Edgewater Ventures, but in Wilmington it’s pretty rare.
“There are other brokers that do a lot of industrial, but Will is the only guy that only does industrial,” Norvell said. “Most everybody else dabbles in a little of something else; a little office, a little retail.
“Traditionally, the market was too small for somebody to rationalize just being an industrial broker in commercial real estate,” he added, “but the bigger the market gets, the more viable that becomes.”
Leonard has watched the region’s industrial market grow and evolve over his more than 25-year career. Born and raised in Wilmington, Leonard said he left for four years to attend Wake Forest University and came right back home. He started out working as a financial planner but quickly realized he needed more life experience.
“It’s a really hard sales pitch coming out of college, trying to approach wealthy people and telling them you want to be their financial planner,” he said, “and you know nothing about the real world yet.”
So, he pivoted to commercial real estate. Leonard already had his real estate license, which he had gotten one summer during college, and he started his real estate career in 2000 with Commonwealth Commercial Properties, now Courtyard Commercial Properties.
He then worked at Harley & Associates Commercial Real Estate for about 10 years before starting with Cape Fear Commercial in 2011.
When he was hired, Cape Fear Commercial wasn’t doing much in the industrial space, Leonard said, and he was the only broker with experience working in the product type. That meant new leads went to him, and his industrial specialty grew organically.
In 2019, the “next frontier” of industrial development arrived in the region, Leonard said, when Chris Ramm, manager of Winston-Salem-based firm Taylor Development Group, submitted plans for the area’s first modern, tilt-up concrete building in Pender Commerce Park.
Ramm said his company saw Wilmington as a logistically strong market for new industrial space and noted the community’s ongoing population and business growth.
“It’s just an underserved market, and so we were … involved with other industrial projects in the Triad, and just saw a big void,” Ramm said, “and thought it was a risk worth taking.”
Leonard played a key role in the project’s development, according to Ramm, negotiating the land purchase and leasing up the 127,000-square-foot building once it was complete.
“That was sort of my first taste of this newer, larger, bigger, modern building that honestly I didn’t really have any experience with at the time,” Leonard said, “because Wilmington didn’t have these things.”
For Leonard, Ramm’s project was the beginning of a boom. Around the same time, Norvell was planning for Wilmington Trade Center, a master-planned, 13-building industrial park on U.S. 421, and Cameron Management and development partner Windsor Commercial were formulating plans for new large-scale industrial buildings in Brunswick County’s International Logistics Park.
Leonard is working with Greensboro-headquartered Samet on leasing for two recently completed industrial buildings on Cedar Hill Road in Navassa and leading the lease-up for Canvasback Capital’s small bay project in Leland Innovation Park.
He handles leasing for a handful of industrial parks and flex spaces under development, including First Flight Business Park, Wrightsboro Business Park and New Hanover County’s Blue Clay Business Park. Leonard said he expects development of the region’s industrial space to continue to cluster along the Interstate 140 corridor.
“I can’t underscore how important I-140 has been to the industrial market,” he said. “I mean, if you look at it, every large building you see that’s either existing or new is within a stone’s throw of that highway.”
Land for industrial projects is becoming scarce in New Hanover County as the area continues to develop, and the Brunswick County industrial market hasn’t proven it can support large-scale industrial yet, Leonard said.
With the industrial buildout that’s ongoing and planned across the region, Leonard said he doesn’t expect to see new projects or industrial developers enter the market anytime soon.
“You’re not going to see a whole lot of new players in the market,” he said, “because of the momentum that those ingrained local developers have and the expansion capabilities they have on the sites that they already control.”
With all of the industrial activity, Leonard said he’s been busier than ever in the last few years.
“What’s pretty cool about Will is he stays under the radar and does a lot of business,” Ramm said, “and he’s just a humble, great guy that gets it done.”
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