Greater Montreal Industrial — Q1 2026

The Quarter in Brief

Greater Montreal's industrial market entered 2026 showing what every broker in this compilation described as early stabilization, after a roughly two-year stretch of negative absorption and rising vacancy. The clearest signal was net absorption, which turned positive for four of the five brokerages: Colliers reported 154,719 square feet (sf) of net absorption, Avison Young 553,876 sf, CBRE 336,312 sf and JLL 125,046 sf, while Cushman & Wakefield recorded negative 779,646 sf year-to-date. The four positive readings span a wide range and rest on different coverage footprints, so the meaningful agreement is on sign rather than size — four brokers recording a return to positive absorption against one still slightly negative.

Each brokerage dated and framed that turn in its own terms. JLL called its 125,046 sf the first positive quarterly figure in two years; Colliers described its result as the first positive net absorption in several quarters; and Avison Young noted that, for the first time since 2023, absorption had outpaced new supply. CBRE characterized the quarter as a strong start to the year. The shared vocabulary across the reports — stabilization, inflection, the worst potentially behind — is the brokers' characterization of the trend, not a forecast offered by this report.

Two further threads ran through every report. Asking net rents continued to soften but at a decelerating pace, clustering between $14.00 and $14.55 psf across the brokerages, with CBRE marking a ninth consecutive quarterly decline. And the construction pipeline, after the 2024–2025 surge, has tightened to roughly 2.4 to 2.8 million sf under way, concentrated in the Laval and North Shore submarkets and still predominantly speculative.