Industrial

For many years, companies seeking to establish major distribution operations for the southwestern United States flocked to one market: Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW). Any deal that required a warehouse or logistics space of several hundred thousand square feet or more headed to the metroplex, and Houston received what was left — deals falling anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 square feet. That began to change in 2010, when oil was consistently trading at close to $100 per barrel. Subsequent innovations in hydraulic fracturing that lowered the threshold at which offshore drilling companies could turn a profit, combined with escalated tensions among Middle Eastern producers, kept prices for American crude at high levels until December 2014. At the time of this writing, oil futures traded at about $58 per barrel, suggesting that any hopes of a recovery by mid-2019 had been premature. But between 2010 and 2014, when the party was in full swing, Houston experienced tremendous job growth that attracted tens of thousands of new residents to the city. More housing was built, and significant amounts of industrial absorption began to stem from the need to store and distribute consumer goods, from food to furniture to household appliances. Today, Houston’s population is …