National Industrial Market Deep Dives

Nashville ended Q4 2025 at 4.2% vacancy with record average asking rents of $10.30/SF NNN. That is a different profile from Savannah. Both are Southeast growth markets, but Nashville is much tighter and less obviously oversupplied. CBRE's 2026 outlook explicitly calls out Nashville as one of the markets likely to remain attractive for occupier expansion, especially where domestic regional distribution and manufacturing matter more than import-gateway exposure.

For underwriting, Nashville is the best benchmark here for a secondary market that still behaves like a landlord market, especially in newer and better-located space.

Cleveland is the lowest-rent market in this group, but also one of the tightest. Q4 2025 ended with 247.6M SF of inventory, 4.0% vacancy, 6.1% availability, and effectively no active construction pipeline. That is not a growth-chasing profile. It is a scarcity-plus-yield profile.

The market matters because it shows that industrial upside does not always have to come from port growth, AI infrastructure, or Sun Belt migration. Sometimes the investment case is simply stable demand, low new supply, and a basis that does not require heroic rent assumptions.

These benchmark markets make the Texas industrial branch easier to read:

• Dallas-Fort Worth should usually be benchmarked against Chicago, not Savannah. Both are large inland logistics systems where speculative supply, submarket differentiation, and liquidity matter more than pure gateway scarcity.
• Houston should be benchmarked against both the Inland Empire and Savannah, but in different ways. It shares Savannah's port-growth logic and the Inland Empire's infrastructure importance, while still having a more defensible moat than Savannah because the Ship Channel and petrochemical stack are harder to replicate.
• Austin and San Antonio should be benchmarked against Nashville more often than against the gateway markets. Nashville shows what a healthy secondary-growth industrial market looks like. That makes Austin's and San Antonio's current vacancy and absorption issues easier to judge without forcing a comparison to port or megaregion logistics hubs.
• Cleveland is the reminder that smaller-bay scarcity and pipeline discipline can still create a durable industrial thesis even when rent growth is not spectacular. That is relevant for Texas value-add and smaller-format industrial strategies that should not be underwritten like hyperscale logistics plays.

• The figures above come from strong secondary brokerage research, not a unified primary transaction dataset.
• Inland Empire metrics require care because CBRE distinguishes the IE Core from the expanded Inland Empire total that includes the northern submarkets.
• Chicago and Cleveland publish both vacancy and availability; those should not be flattened into one number.
• Savannah's market geography was expanded by CBRE beginning in 2024, so older series are not perfectly comparable with current totals.
• This pass did not seed non-Texas market observations into data/properties.db; the page is verified at the wiki layer only.
• If the non-Texas branch deepens further, these markets should eventually become their own geography pages and this analysis should turn into a routing hub.

• Industrial Hub
• Industrial Logistics Underwriting
• CRE Supply Pipeline and Construction Analysis
• Tariff Trade Policy and Reshoring Impact
• Interest Rate and Cap Rate Cycles
• Texas Industrial Cross-Metro Comparison
• Texas Digital Infrastructure Corridors
• Texas AI and Industrial Infrastructure Opportunity Map

• National Industrial Market Verification 2026-04-09
• Legacy Industrial Knowledge Wiki