Greater Vancouver Industrial — Q1 2026

The Quarter in Brief

Greater Vancouver's industrial market opened 2026 with a shift in tone across most of its brokerage reports. After roughly three years of rising vacancy, four of the six brokerages recorded a quarter-over-quarter vacancy decline in Q1 2026 — for several of them the first decrease in twelve to fourteen quarters. Leasing rose to its highest level since early 2022, the construction pipeline thinned to one of its lowest readings in a decade, and rents kept easing but at a slowing pace. The brokers did not all read the quarter the same way — CBRE reported availability still rising — but most of the quarter's fundamentals moved in the same direction.

Demand did the heavy lifting. Cushman & Wakefield reported net absorption of 537k sf, positive for a second consecutive quarter, while Colliers and Avison Young each recorded roughly 1.1 million square feet of absorption — Colliers noting it "nearly doubled that of new supply." New leasing reached 2.78 msf (excluding renewals) on Cushman & Wakefield's count, a 50% quarter-over-quarter increase and the strongest quarter since Q1 2022. At the same time, supply discipline tightened: estimates of space under construction clustered between roughly 2.5 msf and 3.4 msf, well below the multi-year peaks of the 2022–2023 building cycle, and new construction increasingly skewed toward pre-committed, build-to-suit product.

Rents continued to drift lower. Brokers placed the average net asking rent between roughly $18.98 and $19.81 per square foot (psf) — below the $20 threshold for a seventh straight quarter on Cushman & Wakefield's measure — with year-over-year declines in the 2% to 5% range. Several reports tied the softening less to weakening demand than to a shift in what is left on the market: as premium new space leases up, older and lower-quality product makes up a larger share of remaining availability and pulls the regional average down.