U.S. companies leased 202.6 million square feet of industrial property in the third quarter of 2026, the largest quarterly total since 2022, with infrastructure suppliers helping drive warehouse demand, JLL said.
Leasing rose 38.5% from a year earlier and 15.3% from the previous quarter, the commercial real estate firm said in its Oct. 20 report. Net absorption reached 231.6 million square feet through the first nine months of 2026, already exceeding the total for all of 2025.
National asking rents reached $10.55 per square foot, up 3.2% from a year earlier. That was the fastest annual increase since the second quarter of 2024. Overall industrial vacancy fell 0.8 percentage point from a year earlier to 6.8%.
Third-party logistics firms accounted for 17.9% of leasing. Construction materials and building fixtures represented 14.7%; communications and technology, 7.5%; and energy and utilities, 4.6%. JLL linked growth in infrastructure-related demand to data center supply chains, advanced manufacturing, and defense and aerospace activity.
The market was tighter for large, newer buildings than for older, smaller ones. Vacancy in Class A warehouses larger than 1 million square feet dropped from 9.5% to 5.4% over the year, JLL said. Older, smaller properties lost occupants.
Reuters reported that data center projects near Dallas/Fort Worth and Washington, DC, were generating warehouse demand. Citing JLL, it said suppliers and infrastructure providers were gathering near large data center campuses in the Dallas/Fort Worth area.
Reuters said the reported rent growth was based on triple-net leases. Under those contracts, tenants pay property taxes, insurance and common-area upkeep in addition to base rent.
Developers had 317 million square feet of industrial space under construction, up 28.7% from a year earlier and 14.8% from the previous quarter, JLL said. The pipeline was the largest since the first quarter of 2024.
