By Bryce Sylvester
Managing Director, Cushman & Wakefield | CRESCO Real Estate
WARREN, Ohio – If you run a company that’s outgrowing its footprint, or you’re shopping the eastern Ohio market, Warren belongs on your short list.
You’ve seen the headlines by now. Kimberly-Clark picked Warren for its first Ohio plant. The Trumbull Energy Center fired up in Lordstown. Ohio pulled in a 2026 Silver Shovel Award, and the Mahoning Valley keeps landing on national lists it hadn’t cracked in years. I won’t rehash the numbers, because they’ve been covered well and often. What’s worth talking about is what all of it means if you’re a company that isn’t here yet.
It means the hard part is already done. The power is built, and the workforce that just staffed up for a Fortune 500 manufacturer is right here. Suppliers are following them in. When a region hits this kind of stride, the companies that win are the ones who get in before the good sites are gone.
The location does a lot of the work too. Warren sits within 500 miles of roughly half the U.S. population and more than 60% of its purchasing power, midway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh and a day’s drive from both Chicago and New York, with the Ohio Turnpike a few miles west. Lake to River, the JobsOhio partner for the four-county region, is building its strategy around advanced manufacturing, metals, energy and chemicals, and logistics. This corner of Warren fits squarely in that lane.
Here’s the way in. The Western Reserve Industrial Park sits on 73 acres in west Warren, minutes from I-80 and the Ohio Turnpike and rail-adjacent near CSX. There’s a new 98,280 square foot Class A building ready today, and the site supports build-to-suit up to 611,000 square feet. It carries up to 15 megawatts of on-site power. If power is your constraint, and for a lot of manufacturers and data users it’s the whole ballgame right now, that’s rare to be able to say about a site.
The park is owned by Sapientia Ventures, the Warren-based group run by Chuck George and Wiley Runnestrand. Wiley told me they put up the Class A building before a tenant ever asked for it. “We think the demand is coming, and we wanted to be ready for it,” he said.
I come at this from a few sides. Ten years in local government, five in economic development, and now brokerage, which mostly means I read an incentive stack the way the people approving it do. There are real local and state incentives on the table here for projects that qualify, and matching the right ones to your plan is most of what we bring. Behind us is the full Cushman & Wakefield platform, so the site has reach to the right user wherever they happen to be based.
The city is leaning in, too. I asked Mayor Doug Franklin how Warren treats a company that comes knocking. “When a company calls Warren, we call back the same day,” Franklin told me. “We’ve built our local incentives to move at the speed business needs, and we clear the path on permitting and zoning. We’re not going to be the reason a good project lands somewhere else.”
My colleague Jason Laver, who runs the listing, put it plainly when we talked. “I haven’t seen infrastructure come together like this anywhere in northeast Ohio,” he said. “Water, sewer, power, and gas are all here and sized for industry, and that lets us have conversations most sites in this region can’t.”
This is one of the strongest industrial markets in eastern Ohio right now, and it’s still early enough to get in on good terms. If you’ve been circling the market, come walk the site before someone else does.
Pictured at top: New 98,280 square-foot Class A industrial facility built for modern manufacturing, warehouse, and distribution users on Warren’s west side.
