Port of LA's second-best July confirms industrial demand

Speaking with Connect Media president and CEO Daniel Ceniceros on August 20 at Connect Industrial West 2026, Port of Los Angeles executive director Eugene Seroka said the port posted its second-best July on record for container volume — the latest real-time evidence that tariff-driven cargo swings are filling Southern California warehouses. He pointed to the U.S. economy's resilience and size as reasons to be bullish on industrial development, noting that the ports of LA and Long Beach together handle 40% of the nation's containerized imports and 30% of its exports, and that cargo from the Port of LA reaches all 50 states and all 435 congressional districts.

For logistics landlords and the sponsors underwriting industrial deals, the July figure arrives alongside a five-year high in port-adjacent leasing, cargo swinging back to the West Coast as shippers route volume through Southern California and warehouses absorb it.

Seroka is careful not to call the surge a one-way bet. The on-again, off-again tariff policy has become a 'whipsaw effect,' he said, keeping importers 'at the simulation table' and unable to commit to supply-chain plans because the planning horizon has collapsed. The demand is real today, but it is policy-driven demand, which makes it reversible.

The other risk Seroka flagged is quieter and slower-moving: traditional buyers of U.S. agricultural exports are making deals elsewhere—soybeans now come from Argentina and Brazil, almonds from Australia, 'and then a whole host of other products,' he said. That is a slow-moving loss of export share with consequences that outlast any tariff cycle, and if it continues, the return-cargo flows that help balance the economics of imported goods could erode.

His prescription for owners and investors is to keep investing through cycles—now including political and election cycles, not just business and economic ones—arguing that roughly 70% of Americans tend toward the center on what drives the economy and that long-range investment producing cash flow will be safe regardless of policy noise.

For industrial investors, the near-term trade is trickier. The same tariff whipsaw that has accompanied a second-best July and a five-year leasing high can reverse just as quickly, and underwriting Southern California industrial today should price in the surge while stress-testing for the reversal. This cycle is being driven from Washington, not from the warehouses—so the next policy turn will be the real test of whether July's demand was durable or borrowed from the future.