Houston industrial leasing's strongest quarter since early 2022 rests on 19 large leases

Houston's industrial market leased 14.6 million square feet in the third quarter, the strongest three months of tenant demand since early 2022 and a 66% increase on the prior quarter, according to Cushman & Wakefield. Through September, the market had leased 32.7 million square feet, already 97% of the 33.8 million square feet recorded in all of 2025, leaving roughly 1.1 million square feet to find in the fourth quarter to match last year's full total.

Absorption is backing the signings up: tenants took a net 7.3 million square feet in the quarter, the strongest quarterly figure since the first quarter of 2023, and the 18.6 million square feet absorbed in the first nine months of 2026 is already 5.5 million square feet ahead of the 13.1 million absorbed during all of last year.

Cushman attributes the acceleration to a greater concentration of large transactions and counted 19 leases of 250,000 square feet or more in the quarter. Nineteen deals at that scale can carry a quarterly number largely by themselves, so the rebound may owe more to a handful of big commitments landing at once than to a broad thickening of mid-size tenant demand. Large-format users have been rewriting industrial demand data all year: PRED reported in September that Lyft, Uber, Waymo and Zoox leased nearly 1 million square feet of robotaxi industrial space in 2026, more than the 830,000 square feet the four signed from 2022 through 2025 combined, according to Cushman & Wakefield data obtained by Bisnow.

The research does not give Houston's construction pipeline, vacancy, or asking rents, so the split between new buildings and existing inventory is not answerable from it. That distinction decides whether the strength converts into pricing power, and it is the premise behind the build-over-buy trade this publication has followed: Hines, a $92 billion manager, has pivoted from buying to building on the argument that a global construction freeze has created a scarcity advantage. If the same scarcity is at work in Houston, 14.6 million square feet of quarterly leasing should show up in rents before it shows up in new starts.

Office leasing across the same market stayed ahead of last year's pace despite elevated vacancy, so industrial was not alone among Houston's tenant commitments. Matching 2025's leasing total takes about 1.1 million square feet in the fourth quarter, a small number against the 14.6 million the market just cleared; the identity of the tenants that provide the final 1.1 million square feet will matter more than the square footage.