David Messner.
David Messner
Senior Vice President of Real Estate at Costco
Get beyond New York City and it becomes clear there are certain commercial real estate hogs, who buy or lease sprawling spaces by the millions of square feet. These include familiar names like Amazon, Walmart, Target and the wholesale warehouse clubs — the largest of which is Costco.
Costco alone owned about 12 million square feet of industrial space, a number which had doubled in five years, according to an October Wall Street Journal article. Competitors include BJ’s Wholesale Club and Sam’s Club, a unit of Walmart. David Messner is the Costco senior vice president who oversees all that real estate.
In February, he spoke with CO at length about Costco’s activities. That included talking about overseeing the company’s international expansion, with stores opening in Spain, France, Iceland and China, with New Zealand and Sweden in the works. He spoke about how Costco in early 2020 acquired delivery business Innovel Solutions, a Sears legacy firm, which supercharged the retailer’s delivery capacity.
“If you buy a dishwasher, a huge TV or furniture, you can order online and we’ll deliver it,” Messner said in February. “Our network gets us to 95 percent of the U.S. population within a day’s drive.”
Costco is dedicated to being proximate to the American consumer, Messner said. The attention to detail goes down to the parking stalls. Each U.S.Costco site these days is about 20 acres, up from 18, and the company makes sure each consumer has a roomy place to park, so “you don’t get door dinged and you can get cars through the middle easy,” Messner said. “What we’re finding is that the number of spaces is really a determining factor regarding how much business we can do.”
But that doesn’t keep the retailer out of markets like Brooklyn, New York’s most populous borough.
“The rule of thumb for any retailer is the more desirable the market,” Messner said, “the more creative you’ll get regarding how to serve it.”
