Industrial real estate was the last thing on Ben Seeger’s mind when he returned fresh out of law school to the Seattle area in 2010.
He had his sights set on environmental law, a specialty Seeger, an avid skier and mountain biker who grew up in the Seattle area, described as an early passion.
Instead, Seeger, recently named Northwest region partner for Reno, Nevada-based logistics developer Dermody Properties, found himself first drawn to real estate and then to logistics properties, which has become one of the hottest sectors in the industry.
“It’s the tangible nature of it,” Seeger said, describing what drew him from law into real estate. Early on, Seeger said he was able to see the real-life effects of the deals he worked on.
“I saw that apartment building that I helped that developer acquire, or I saw that really cool restaurant that I helped lease,” Seeger said. “I found something that I never knew I’d love as much as I did.”
The environmental law that he’d enjoyed studying in school had by then already turned out to have less of a draw in practice, especially with bills for his student loans suddenly a reality, Seeger jokes. After studying law at Vanderbilt, Seeger came back to the Seattle area and worked for a regional bank, Washington Federal, focusing on the legal aspects of corporate real estate deals.
After a series of professional moves, Seeger ended up at Summit Law Group in 2017, where he connected with Amazon. That link lured him to the business side of real estate for the first time, and he joined Amazon to work on its logistics team.
"It was in the early days of the last-mile program at Amazon," Seeger said. "I got to be right there and help acquire the real estate necessary to build it out to where it is now. It was a fantastic learning opportunity."
Rise in Demand
While Amazon was already solidly established as a logistics leader, the pandemic brought online shopping front and center for consumers, and brought logistics to the fore for investors and developers.
Over the course of the following four years — including the first two years of the pandemic — Seeger rose to lead sourcing and development of logistics facilities for Amazon across North America, Latin America, Australia and Singapore.
"The sheer volume of activity and the number of sites that I touched and saw and was exposed to throughout my time at Amazon really kind of has given me a great foundation to join the developer side," he said.
As the number of projects increased, so did the list of developers with whom Seeger worked, eventually bringing him in touch with Dermody, where he started in September.
Now, though, Seeger keeps his cards enigmatically close to his vest on the topic of the future of a sector often described as one ripe for revolution by, among other things, automation and artificial intelligence.
At Dermody, Seeger co-leads with Phil Wood acquisitions in the company's Northwest region, an area including Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. CoStar research shows the company holding 15 properties in the region, totaling 1.5 million square feet. Nationwide, CoStar data shows the firm holding 111 properties, for a total of 8.6 million square feet, with 2.3 million under construction.