Deal management software for cold storage developers

What makes cold storage development different

A dry warehouse is a shell. A cold storage facility is a machine, and that single fact reorders the entire development pipeline.

Two diligence items move to the front. First, power. Refrigeration loads require utility service a conventional distribution building never needs, so power capacity and service timelines get confirmed alongside land control, not after it. Second, the refrigeration program itself: system selection, temperature zones and convertibility between cooler and freezer space, insulated slab design, and envelope specs. These decisions are locked in early and are expensive to change, so they generate diligence tasks and consultant coordination before a shovel is anywhere near the ground.

The economics then create a third difference: the pre-commit gate. Cold construction costs a multiple of dry warehouse cost per square foot, and the transaction market prices the finished product accordingly. A 179,000 sq. ft. speculative cold storage facility in Columbus sold for $75.7 million in 2025, roughly $423 per sq. ft., in a year when U.S. industrial transactions overall averaged $138 per sq. ft. per Yardi Matrix. With that much capital per foot at risk, most cold storage pipelines hold a formal gate: no vertical construction until a tenant commitment, or an explicit spec decision signed off by the capital partner.

So the stage list looks like this: site and power screening, land control, refrigeration and design program, the pre-commit or spec gate, entitlement, pre-construction, vertical, commissioning, lease-up. The counterparties include refrigeration engineers, food and grocery tenants with their own facilities teams, utility engineers, and lenders who underwrite cold differently than dry.

A worked example: the pre-commit gate in numbers

The gate math is worth running explicitly, because the market data makes it concrete. New cold storage developments average about 230,000 sq. ft. while the average cold storage lease signed over the last five years is about 120,000 sq. ft., per Newmark data reported by Bisnow. A spec building at the development average needs roughly two average-size tenants to fill. That is two independent leasing outcomes, in a market where newly built product (2020 to 2025 vintage) carried 10.1% vacancy in Q4 2025 while 2006 to 2019 stock sat more than 97% occupied.

Now put that inside a real pipeline. A cold storage developer runs five projects: two in site and power screening, one in land control with a power study due back in six weeks, one at the pre-commit gate, and one vertical. The gate project is a 250,000 sq. ft. design with a target of 60% committed before the construction loan closes. Open items on that one deal: an LOI with a protein processor expiring in 21 days, a second tenant's facilities team reviewing freezer-to-cooler convertibility, three construction loan quotes with different recourse terms, and long-lead refrigeration equipment that must be ordered before pricing lapses.

Every one of those items is a dated dependency, and they interact. If the LOI slips, the loan terms move; if the equipment order waits on the loan, the delivery date moves; if the delivery date moves, the tenant's commitment weakens. A team tracking this across email threads and a spreadsheet is making its most expensive decision of the year from stale information.

What the market data says right now

Cold storage just went through its first real supply test. Roughly 10 million sq. ft. of new cold storage delivered in 2025, a record year, against net absorption of roughly 3.5 million sq. ft., down from about 4.2 million in 2024, per Newmark data reported by Bisnow. Vacancy reached nearly 7% at the end of 2025, the highest point in at least 20 years.

The pricing story explains why developers kept building anyway. Cold storage rents roughly doubled from about $14 per sq. ft. in 2019 to an annual average of $28 per sq. ft. The user base is expanding too: the number of cold storage companies grew from roughly 1,500 in 2020 to closer to 1,800 by the end of 2025, and a record 31% of cold storage sales in 2025 went to end users, triple their share from 2024.

The forward pipeline has already corrected, with about 5.9 million sq. ft. left for 2026. For context, the broader industrial market posted 6.7% vacancy in Q1 2026 per CBRE, so cold's roughly 7% headline looks similar, but the vintage split above is the number a developer should underwrite against. The market is rewarding committed, purpose-built product and punishing empty new boxes.

For a developer's screening criteria, three implications follow. First, submarket selection has to account for which of the 10 million sq. ft. delivered in 2025 is still sitting empty nearby, because that space is the direct competition for any tenant conversation. Second, the end-user buyer pool is now a real exit: with 31% of 2025 sales going to end users, a purpose-built facility has more than one way out. Third, the thinner 2026 pipeline means a project that clears its pre-commit gate this year delivers into less competition than anything that broke ground in 2024. Those are pipeline-level judgments, and they are only available to teams whose project data is current enough to make them.

Tool fit for a cold storage development team

The distinguishing requirement for cold is the gate. Whatever system the team uses has to show, per project and on demand, the current state of tenant commitment, financing, and long-lead orders together. Tools that scatter those three across separate trackers force the team to reassemble the picture before every decision.

How MotionCRE maps to a cold storage pipeline

MotionCRE handles the cold storage case with the same structure it gives any CRE deal, configured for this workflow.

The pipeline board takes custom stages, so the gate is a real column: Site and Power Screening, Land Control, Design Program, Pre-Commit Gate, Pre-Construction, Vertical, Lease-Up. Days-in-stage shows how long a project has been stuck at the gate, which is usually the most expensive place to stall.

Each project's deal workspace carries more than 50 fields including power, and custom fields cover cold-specific items like temperature zones, pallet positions, and refrigeration system type. Key dates hold the LOI expiry, the power study deliverable, and equipment order deadlines with status tracking. The financing section tracks each construction lender from first contact through commitment, with side-by-side quote comparison for the recourse and pricing terms that differ across cold-experienced lenders. Due diligence checklists span eight categories including environmental and zoning, files keep the power studies and thermal design documents versioned in the deal, and AI Associate answers questions from those files, such as what the utility's will-serve letter actually committed to.

Pricing starts at $249 per month for 3 seats, with a 14-day free trial with full access. A credit card is required and you can cancel anytime.

Where to go deeper

Cold storage sits inside the broader industrial development discipline, so the workflow foundations in deal management for industrial developers apply here too. For the category basics, read what deal management software is. And for the asset class where power diligence dominates even more completely, see deal management for data center developers.