For the first time since the pandemic-era building boom collapsed, the numbers behind America’s warehouse sector are pointing in the right direction.
But nobody in the industry is calling it a recovery just yet — they’re calling it a floor.
Real estate services giant Cushman & Wakefield has forecast that the US commercial real estate sector is entering 2026 with renewed momentum after a year defined by extraordinary macroeconomic uncertainty, with clearer visibility and growing optimism across both leasing and capital markets.
Within that broader outlook, the industrial and warehousing segment — the backbone of America’s e-commerce and freight distribution network — is positioned as one of the more resilient corners of the market.
A Downturn Three Years in the Making
To understand why analysts are treating a modest uptick as significant news, it helps to look at how far the market fell.
According to research from market intelligence firm Interact Analysis, the number of new warehouses entering the US building stock peaked at 2,784 in 2022, at the height of pandemic-driven e-commerce expansion. From there, the market went into a steep, multi-year slide.
By 2025, warehouse completions had collapsed to just 585 buildings — a fraction of the 2022 peak, and the clearest evidence yet of how aggressively developers pulled back once financing tightened and tenant demand cooled.
Industrial leasing demand told the same story: in the second quarter of 2025, it fell by 11.3 million square feet, the first quarterly decline in 15 years. Roughly half of the warehouses completed that quarter sat vacant.
Interact Analysis senior analyst Matthieu Kulezak wrote that the market bottomed out in 2025 and is now slowly recovering, benefiting from easing economic uncertainty and steady e-commerce demand — but was careful to temper expectations for how fast that recovery will unfold.
“Renewed trade tensions between the U.S. and China could quickly reverse recent gains, reigniting uncertainty and delaying investment decisions once again.”
— Matthieu Kulezak, Senior Analyst, Interact Analysis
The Cushman & Wakefield Signal
Cushman & Wakefield’s own outlook strikes a similarly measured but more confident tone. The firm’s Chief Economist, Kevin Thorpe, described a market that has moved past its worst point and is beginning to reward the patience shown by developers and investors through 2025’s turbulence.
“As we head into 2026, the tone has shifted meaningfully. There is still risk on both sides of the outlook, but we’ve moved past the peak levels of uncertainty, and confidence in the CRE sector is building. Capital is flowing again, interest rates are moving lower, and leasing fundamentals are generally stabilizing or improving. If 2025 was a test of resilience, 2026 has real potential to reward it.”
— Kevin Thorpe, Chief Economist, Cushman & Wakefield
In the industrial sector specifically, Cushman & Wakefield notes that demand picked up in late 2025 as trade-policy uncertainty eased, freeing tenants to move forward with decisions they had been sitting on for months.
E-commerce continues to be the sector’s structural tailwind, underpinning leasing activity even as broader construction spending remains cautious.
With new development having slowed sharply through the downturn, the firm expects industrial vacancy to stabilize through 2026 and begin tightening again in 2027 — the classic signature of a market working through oversupply before the next growth cycle begins.
Why the Recovery Will Feel Slow
Two structural forces are keeping this rebound gradual rather than sharp. The first is cost. Construction costs across the US industrial sector remain at record highs, a legacy of pandemic-era materials inflation and tariff-driven price pressure that has never fully unwound.
That keeps developers highly selective about which projects clear the financing bar, even as capital becomes more available.
The second is a genuine shift in where speculative capital wants to go.
Kulezak notes that speculative development is now increasingly focused on data centers rather than traditional distribution centers — a redirection of capital driven by the explosive growth in AI infrastructure and hyperscale computing demand.
For warehouse developers, that means competing for financing, land, power capacity, and even construction crews against a data centre sector that is currently offering far more attractive returns.
Interact Analysis does not expect US warehouse construction to return to pre-pandemic levels until 2028 — a full six years after the 2022 peak.
Much of the activity that is moving forward in 2026 is described as previously planned projects that were shelved through late 2024 and early 2025, now returning to the pipeline as their sponsors gain clarity on their own end-markets, rather than a wave of new speculative starts.
What It Means for Contractors and Equipment Suppliers
For construction firms, equipment dealers, and materials suppliers watching the US industrial pipeline, the practical takeaway is one of selective opportunity rather than broad-based growth.
Projects that do move forward in 2026 are increasingly being built to a higher specification than the previous cycle: rising clear heights, automation-ready structural loading, and dock configurations built around tenant automation requirements are now baseline expectations rather than premium features.
That shift has direct implications for heavy equipment demand — from reinforced concrete and structural steel specified for higher automation loads, to the material handling and site equipment needed to service increasingly technical build-outs.
It also reinforces a broader capital reallocation story already visible across the sector: the same AI-driven investment wave reshaping data centre construction is now the single biggest swing factor in whether the warehouse sector’s slow recovery holds through 2026 and beyond.
For now, the message from analysts on both sides of the market — the cautious tone of Interact Analysis and the more upbeat read from Cushman & Wakefield — agrees on the essential point: the bottom is behind the US warehouse sector.
What comes next depends on whether trade tensions stay contained, financing costs continue to ease, and capital can be pulled back from data centres for long enough to fund the next generation of distribution space.
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