This week Dayton Street Partners broke ground on the 180,300-square-foot building rising on 13 acres it assembled south of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on Rock Hill Drive. Rock Hill Distribution Center, as the project is called, is slated to be finished by the third quarter of 2021.

Dayton Street declined to say how much it paid for the land, and the transaction was not immediately available in the public deeds.

Atlanta commercial real estate services firm Lee & Associates was tapped to market the distribution center for lease.

Dayton Street and other developers expanding in Atlanta see demand driven by consumers who are turning more than ever to online shopping, especially during the pandemic. An industry rule-of-thumb is that for every $1 billion in e-commerce sales another 1.2 million square feet of new e-commerce space is needed. Consider longtime Atlanta developer Portman Holdings just launched an industrial division. Another area of growth among industrial properties is within the cold-storage industry, where the largest giants are gobbling up other companies in a bid to build global logistics networks.

DSP was a major player in office space in its hometown but in recent years moved to industrial property investments. Earlier this year the company bought distribution centers around Chicago O’Hare International Airport. More private equity is being sunk into the industrial property sector across the country, a trend underpinned by the growth of ecommerce.

Online retail giant Amazon.com is building its fullfillment engine across Atlanta and is the biggest player in a profound and wider shift in the way Americans consume goods and services. In the past 20 years, ecommerce has grown from less than 1% to over 16% of total retail sales in the U.S., according to The Brookings Institution.

Covid-19’s impact on the food, beverage and logistics industries is also resulting in demand for cold storage warehouses for food storage and potentially for vaccines. Distribution centers are needed to hold the vast increase of goods bought online in recent years, especially during 2020 as people were forced to stay home to slow the spread of the coronavirus. This year, ecommerce sales jumped 32% from the first quarter to second quarter. At the same time, overall retail sales decreased 4%.

A recent report by Newmark Knight Frank, an Atlanta commercial real estate firm, said industrial properties appear to be the best positioned to get through the Covid-19 economic downturn in Atlanta and across the country.