Warehouse Rents Tie a Record; Few Are Building

GREENVILLE, S.C., Oct. 30. Warehouse rents in Greenville and Spartanburg are back at their record even with 8.5 per cent of the space empty, and almost nobody is building more. Asking rent averaged $6.03 a square foot a year in the third quarter, matching the high of late 2023 and up 2 per cent in a year, while less than 1.7 million square feet is under construction, 8.4 per cent of the pipeline at the end of 2022, according to Cushman & Wakefield.

Tenants keep taking space. The market has added occupied space for eight quarters running, about 646,000 square feet in the third quarter and more than 2.6 million this year, and vacancy in space offered directly by landlords has fallen to 7.1 per cent, more than three points below its peak at the end of 2024. Along the Greer and Highway 101 corridor, rents rose 3.6 per cent in a single quarter to $6.40, so a 100,000-square-foot building there now asks $640,000 a year.

Cushman & Wakefield said limited big-box availability made the third quarter the first this year without a lease of more than 500,000 square feet, and the average new lease shrank to about 41,000 square feet, from more than 87,000 in the first half. Developers broke ground on three speculative buildings totaling about 548,000 square feet.