The Columbus industrial market, read from the buy side

What traded in 2025

Columbus industrial sales reached $1.1 billion through the first nine months of 2025, the highest nine-month total since 2022, according to Matthews' Q3 2025 market report. Third-quarter volume alone hit $352 million, up 22 percent year over year.

The composition of that volume matters as much as the total. The largest trades were institutional purchases of leased Class A product: Matthews reported ElmTree Funds paid $136 million for a 1.2 million square foot DSV-leased property in Licking County, and Prologis sold a McKesson-occupied facility for $67.4 million at a 5.5 percent cap rate. Core capital paying sub-6 caps for credit-leased big boxes is the clearest possible signal that Columbus has moved from a repricing market to a competitive one.

For an acquisitions team, that shift changes the job. In 2023 and 2024 the challenge was conviction, since few comps existed and lenders were cautious. In 2026 the challenge is competition: more bidders on every marketed deal and a broker community with fresh comps to price against.

The Q4 scoreboard

Lee & Associates' Q4 2025 Columbus report puts hard numbers on where the market finished the year. Every figure below is from that report.

Read the price line twice. Average pricing moved from $89 to $111 per square foot in four quarters, a 25 percent increase, while cap rates barely moved. That combination means the price gains came from rent growth and asset quality mix, not cap rate compression, which is a healthier foundation for a buyer underwriting an exit.

The named Q4 trades show where institutional money cleared, per the same Lee & Associates report:

Three different global institutions bought Columbus big boxes in a single quarter, all Class A, all between $82 and $96 per square foot. That band is now the reference point for anyone underwriting large-format product in the metro.

The underwriting math behind the Q4 prints

Here is the arithmetic a buyer should run against those comps. Take EQT's Gateway Park purchase: 748,791 square feet at $70.2 million, or $93.75 per square foot. At the market average 6.10 percent cap rate from Lee & Associates, a price like that implies roughly $4.28 million of NOI, which works out to about $5.72 per square foot.

Now compare that to the market's $6.97 average NNN asking rate. An implied income yield of $5.72 per square foot against $6.97 asking rents means the big-box institutional trades are clearing at in-place rents meaningfully below where the leasing market sits today. Every one of those deals embeds a mark-to-market thesis: renew or re-lease at current asking rates and the going-in yield improves without touching the building.

That gap is the actual opportunity in Columbus, and it is also the diligence load. Whether a specific deal captures the mark-to-market depends on lease expiration timing, tenant renewal probability, and submarket-level supply. With 4.53 million square feet under construction per Lee & Associates, a 2027 expiration in a submarket with two speculative deliveries is a different bet than one with none. This is exactly the kind of deal-by-deal variable that belongs in a structured deal workspace rather than scattered across underwriting files.

Demand has an unusual second engine

Most Midwest logistics markets run on one demand engine: distribution. Columbus reaches roughly half the US population within a one-day drive, sits at the junction of I-70 and I-71, and is anchored by Rickenbacker International Airport, one of the largest inland ports in the country, per Heartland Real Estate Business.

The second engine is the manufacturing wave. The same report catalogs Intel's more than $20 billion semiconductor campus in New Albany, the largest economic development deal in Ohio history, the $4 billion LG-Honda battery plant near Washington Court House, and Anduril's Arsenal-1, a roughly $1 billion, 5 million square foot defense manufacturing facility in Pickaway County near Rickenbacker. Hyperscale data center land purchases by AWS, Meta, Microsoft, and Google add a third demand claim on the region's land and power.

Leasing depth backs this up. Lee & Associates' top Q4 leases included Crane Logistics taking 1,198,965 square feet in Commercial Point, DHL Supply Chain taking 737,421 square feet in Obetz, and Meta taking 300,400 square feet in New Albany. For a buyer, supplier and logistics requirements tied to committed manufacturing projects are the kind of demand that shows up regardless of where consumer spending goes in a given quarter.

The funnel math for a Columbus buyer in 2026

Suppose your mandate is two Columbus industrial acquisitions in 2026 in the $15 to $75 million range. The market traded $1.1 billion in nine months per Matthews, so annualized volume near $1.5 billion is a reasonable planning number. At the deal sizes above, that suggests a few dozen relevant trades a year, of which maybe 20 to 25 fit a specific buy box on size, submarket, and lease profile, and not all of those are marketed.

The funnel that wins two deals from that opportunity set looks like this: screen every OM and whisper deal that fits the box, roughly 25 over the year, fully underwrite 12 to 15, bid 6 to 8, and go under contract on 3 to allow for one falling out in diligence. At 15 to 25 hours per full underwrite plus the mark-to-market lease work described above, that is 250 or more underwriting hours in a market where bid deadlines cluster.

The constraint at that pace is organization. Each live deal carries its own rent roll analysis, lease abstracts, environmental and PCA timelines, and lender outreach, and the deals move on the seller's calendar rather than yours. A pipeline board that shows all 8 to 12 live pursuits with days-in-stage keeps the team bidding on schedule instead of rediscovering deadlines in email threads.

Running a Columbus acquisitions pipeline

Columbus is a market where the data now favors prepared buyers: falling vacancy, rising rents, institutional comps to price against, and a manufacturing demand engine that most competing metros lack. It is also a market where the margin between winning and watching is operational, because the best deals draw multiple institutional bids and the mark-to-market thesis requires real lease-level diligence on every pursuit.

MotionCRE holds that workload in one place: the pipeline for the funnel, a workspace per deal for files and key dates, and financing tracking for the lender side. For how industrial teams typically configure their stages and fields, see our guide to deal management software for industrial developers. And for a contrast with a supply-heavy Sun Belt market, see our brief on industrial acquisitions in Phoenix.