The Inland Empire industrial market in 2026, provider by provider

The country's biggest industrial market is finding its floor

The Inland Empire runs about 660.4 million SF of industrial inventory, and after two years of rising vacancy and falling rents, the Q1 2026 data reads like a market bottoming rather than one still falling. Leasing volume hit 22.3 million SF in Q1 2026, up 45.5 percent from 15.3 million SF the prior quarter and 21.9 percent year over year, per Bisnow's reporting. New leases accounted for 13.6 million SF of that, 61 percent of the total, so tenants are taking new commitments rather than just renewing in place.

The supply side has gone quiet at exactly the right moment. Q1 2026 completions totaled just 102,000 SF, against roughly 2 million SF in Q1 2025, per CBRE figures in the same Bisnow report. Marketwide asking rents average about $1.00 per SF monthly, with a wide submarket split: $1.10 in the IE West and $0.90 in the IE East.

Capital has noticed. The Registry SoCal reported $381.6 million of Inland Empire industrial sales in Q1 2026, alongside falling vacancy. Buyers who sat out the repricing are re-entering while rents are still finding bottom.

Why every brokerage reports a different quarter

Q1 2026 in the Inland Empire is a case study in why deal teams should never blend market reports. Here is what the major providers published for the same market and the same quarter.

CBRE and Colliers vacancy figures per Bisnow; Kidder figures per Kidder Mathews' Q1 2026 Inland Empire report.

The absorption row is the striking one. Kidder recorded essentially flat absorption at negative 40,994 SF, while CBRE recorded negative 4.7 million SF, a spread of more than 4.6 million SF on the same quarter. The Registry SoCal, drawing on yet another dataset, reported positive absorption of 2.8 million SF. CBRE's Rick Cozart attributed his firm's negative print to a handful of major move-outs in massive blocks of space, the kind of event that lands differently depending on which buildings a tracker counts and when.

For this brief we anchor absorption to Kidder Mathews' figure, negative 40,994 SF, and say so explicitly: it comes from the provider's own published report rather than secondhand aggregation. The practical rule for your underwriting is the same one we apply here. Pick one provider per metric, write the provider's name next to the number in your model, and never average two brokerages into a blended figure. A lender's screening analyst will run the same check, and a memo that mixes CBRE vacancy with Colliers absorption reads as sloppy even when each number is individually right.

What traded, with names and a basis

Two named 2026 trades bracket the market's pricing. In February, MDH Partners bought a 410,000 SF warehouse at 13880 Monte Vista Avenue in Chino from an affiliate of Nuveen for $105 million, about $256 per SF, part of a seven-property, 1.6 million SF portfolio that was 91 percent leased to 13 tenants. Commercial Observer's report also cites Overton Moore Properties paying over $120 million for a nearly 526,000 SF distribution center in the region, a second comp in the same band.

In June, Southwest Traders paid $40.5 million for the 229,934 SF Building 3 at Gateway at Menifee, roughly $176 per SF, with plans to spend about $25 million retrofitting part of the building into a refrigerated distribution center. That is a user purchase in the IE East at a meaningful discount to the Chino institutional comp, which is exactly the West-versus-East spread the $1.10 versus $0.90 rent split predicts.

The yield math on the Chino comp

Run the arithmetic an acquisitions team should put in front of IC before bidding an IE West warehouse in 2026. At the marketwide average asking rent of $1.00 per SF monthly, a stabilized building generates $12.00 per SF in annual base rent. Against the MDH comp basis of $256 per SF, that is a 4.7 percent yield before credit loss and structural vacancy. Underwrite the IE West average of $1.10 and the same basis returns 5.2 percent.

Now stress the rent line instead of the exit cap. Kidder measured asking rents down 6.7 percent year over year as of Q1 2026. If your in-place roll is at peak-2022 rents, marking those leases to today's market on renewal takes the 4.7 percent yield toward 4.4 percent, a bigger hit than most models' 25 basis point cap rate sensitivity. In this market the honest risk is rent basis, not exit pricing, and the deals that pencil are the ones bought below the mid-$200s institutional band or bought with below-market in-place rents that roll up rather than down.

That is also the argument for patience on the buy side. With completions near zero and leasing volume up 45.5 percent in a quarter, the vacancy peak is likely in. The window where sellers still price to 2024 fear while tenants lease at 2026 volume is the window acquisition teams are paid to work.

Running an Inland Empire acquisitions pipeline

Working this market means screening a steady stream of broker packages across two submarkets with different rent economics, while tracking a handful of live pursuits through LOI, PSA, and diligence. The teams that do it well keep every pursuit on a pipeline board with days-in-stage visible, so a deal quietly aging in underwriting gets a decision instead of a shrug. Each pursuit gets a deal workspace holding the OM, rent roll, comps, and correspondence, and due diligence tracking is part of deal workspaces, covering the environmental, title, zoning, and physical workstreams that Southern California industrial deals live or die on.

Debt quotes deserve the same discipline, since five lenders quoting the same Chino warehouse will return five different structures. MotionCRE's financing tracking keeps quotes comparable side by side on the deal record. For the structural view of industrial pipelines, see our guide to deal management for industrial developers and the MotionCRE industrial solution. Teams watching port-driven markets nationally can compare this against the Savannah industrial brief, where a younger market is digesting its own supply wave.

The read for 2026

The bifurcation inside the metro numbers

The IE trades as two markets wearing one name. Big-box product in the East Valley, where most of the new supply delivered, behaves differently from infill mid-bay in the West Valley, where land constraints keep the competitive set tight. Buyers underwriting lease-up should pull comps from the correct segment, and buyers pricing stabilized product should expect the spread between the two to show up in exit cap assumptions as well as rents.

The Inland Empire's reset is ending on the evidence available: vacancy clustered near 8 percent across providers, construction deliveries near zero, rents around $1.00 per SF and still soft, leasing volume up sharply, and institutional capital paying $256 per SF for leased product. Absorption is the one metric the providers cannot agree on, which is a data-methodology story more than a market story. Anchor your model to one dataset, underwrite rent basis harder than exit cap, and treat 2026 as the year the market hands disciplined buyers a basis they will not see again once the delivery cliff works through vacancy.