{"id":176538,"date":"2026-04-26T11:30:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-26T11:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/176538\/"},"modified":"2026-04-26T11:30:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-26T11:30:08","slug":"after-dealing-with-warehouse-vacancies-lehigh-valley-landlords-are-finding-tenants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/176538\/","title":{"rendered":"After dealing with warehouse vacancies, Lehigh Valley landlords are finding tenants"},"content":{"rendered":"

If a warehouse in the Lehigh Valley is sitting empty, chances are it won\u2019t be for long.<\/p>\n

Commercial real estate company CBRE said the outlook for industrial buildings in 2026 is good, with numbers trending in the right direction.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe do expect vacancy rates to continue to decrease as the year goes on,\u201d said Leah B. Balerno, senior vice president of CBRE Industrial & Logistics.<\/p>\n

The vacancy rate for industrial buildings, including warehouses, in the Valley for the first quarter of 2026 was 10.9% after hitting 11% last year.<\/p>\n

Heather Kreiger, principal and regional research director for Lee & Associates of Eastern Pennsylvania, said balance is returning to the market.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe biggest takeaway from the first quarter is that this market is continuing to move in the right direction,\u201d Kreiger said. \u201cVacancy has been trending down quarter after quarter since the beginning of 2025, and that tells us the region is gradually working through the wave of supply that came out of the post-COVID construction boom.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the quarter that ended March 31, CBRE said the region had an inventory of 118 million square feet.<\/p>\n

For statistical purposes, CBRE rolls the Lehigh Valley into what it calls the I-78\/I-81 Corridor along with the eastern part of the state outside of the Philadelphia area. Vacancy rates in the rest of the corridor ranged from 4.5% in Lancaster to 11.1% in Scranton, with an average of 8.3%.<\/p>\n

Balerno said new leasing activity in the Lehigh Valley totaled about 2.1 million square feet, which is outpacing the year-to-date rate from the same quarter in 2025.<\/p>\n

The largest lease was for 726,000 square feet at a Prologis-owned warehouse at 8400 Industrial Blvd. in Upper Macungie Township. That space was vacated by Customized Distribution Services Inc. in 2024<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Demand for larger warehouses is on an upward trend.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe big box warehouses are becoming a thing again,\u201d Balerno said. \u201cWe are seeing a higher demand for larger spaces.\u201d<\/p>\n

She said the push to larger buildings is a continued flight to quality for companies that are looking for more room to function, with higher ceilings, strong parking ratios for cars and trailers, configuration and dock loading.<\/p>\n

However, that inventory is limited.<\/p>\n

\u201cDemand is outpacing the product that is currently available,\u201d Balerno said.<\/p>\n

Lee & Associates\u2019 Kreiger said the recovery is still uneven with a continuing gap between available space and vacancy.<\/p>\n

\u201cMarket fundamentals are getting stronger, but we\u2019re not completely in the clear yet,\u201d Kreiger said. \u201cThe market is improving, but there is still a meaningful amount of dark space and near-term availability that could affect vacancy over the next six months. This is a better market than it was a year ago, but it is still a market that needs to be watched carefully.\u201d<\/p>\n

CBRE reported that the average rent per square foot in the Lehigh Valley was about $11.51, down slightly from $11.53 in the previous quarter, but still up from $11.29 at the end of 2024. That average in northern and central New Jersey in the first quarter was $17.09. However, the Valley has the highest rate in the I-78\/I-81 corridor, though some renters will pay the rate for closer access to New Jersey ports, Balerno said.<\/p>\n

Looking at the big picture, other areas are seeing a lot more development. While the Valley had a little more than 1 million square feet in the construction pipeline, places such as Hazleton had 4 million, the Harrisburg\/York area had 2 million and Reading had 2.5 million.<\/p>\n

In its 2025 annual report, the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission said it reviewed about 7.2 million square feet of industrial building proposals, with about 3.8 million square feet planned for warehouses.<\/p>\n

CBRE also looked at office space trends in the greater Philadelphia area, which includes the Lehigh Valley. The Valley has an inventory of 9.5 million square feet with a vacancy rate of 19.8%, up slightly from the previous quarter.<\/p>\n

Morning Call reporter Evan Jones can be reached at ejones@mcall.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If a warehouse in the Lehigh Valley is sitting empty, chances are it won\u2019t be for long. Commercial…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":176539,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,60,433,157,434,28,1081,432],"class_list":{"0":"post-176538","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-allentown","8":"tag-allentown","9":"tag-allentown-headlines","10":"tag-allentown-news","11":"tag-business","12":"tag-lehigh-county","13":"tag-lehigh-valley","14":"tag-northampton-county","15":"tag-pennsylvania","16":"tag-real-estate","17":"tag-top-stories-tmc"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176538\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}