Market Reports

Columbia’s industrial market is evolving into a competitive contender in the Southeast, with only a low 4.7 percent vacancy rate. The Scout Motors manufacturing project is a huge win for Richland County and the Midlands and will bring back the iconic Scout SUV (and pick-up truck). The 4,000 jobs on 1,600 acres is greatly anticipated.  South Carolina was the fastest growing state in 2024, according to U-Haul, and near the top in 2025, with no signs of slowing. Columbia is in the middle of this steady growth with its central location as an excellent logistics hub with I-20, I-77 and I-26 and less than two hours from the Port of Charleston. Growing inventory The Columbia industrial market now contains approximately 81 million square feet of inventory, reflecting steady expansion over recent years. Despite being smaller than major logistics markets, Columbia stands out due to its active construction pipeline, with nearly 4 million square feet under development as of late 2025.  This represents one of the highest development ratios among comparable secondary markets, signaling strong investor confidence and long-term growth expectations. Much of this new supply is concentrated in: • Build-to-suit logistics facilities • Large-scale speculative distribution centers  • Advanced manufacturing …

The Upstate South Carolina industrial market is at an inflection point — an expected condition in a maturing and evolving market. Similar transitions have occurred in prior cycles and have consistently required lease rates to adjust more rapidly than traditional annual market escalations. These adjustments are driven by a combination of factors, including supply and demand dynamics, construction costs, capital markets and broader economic conditions. Currently, construction costs are the primary constraint impacting new deliveries. The post-COVID development surge resulted in over 30 million square feet of speculative industrial construction, a portion of which has yet to be fully absorbed.  Today, we are approaching pre-COVID metrics with roughly 6.4 million square feet of speculative inventory (delivered or under construction) and an overall vacancy rate of approximately 7.3 percent. At this level, certain submarkets are at the point where additional speculative inventory will be required to meet tenant demand. The challenge lies in pricing. Much of the existing vacant space was delivered under a materially different construction cost structure, resulting in lease comps that do not reflect today’s construction and land costs. While incremental rent growth has occurred, it has not fully bridged the gap between legacy pricing and the economics …

Over the course of this year, Greenville-Spartanburg’s industrial market is expected to continue its overall upward trajectory with increasing rental rates, record-low vacancy rates and ongoing tenant demand.  The fundamentals of Upstate South Carolina’s industrial market are among the strongest anywhere in the country right now due to a myriad of cylinders on which it is simultaneously firing. The market’s plethora of demand drivers include e-commerce users, manufacturing, the automotive industry and the draw of the Inland Port located in Greer.  To understand the full picture, however, it’s important to also consider what the Greenville- Spartanburg market is not firing on. The market is not stifled by unions, high regulation or the lack of viable sites, available buildings and utility infrastructure some other markets have to contend with.  An important factor affecting current absorption is multiple fourth-quarter tenant occupancy dates being pushed from fourth quarter of 2022 to first quarter of 2023. There was 17.9 million square feet of industrial space under construction at year-end 2022, with approximately 4 million square feet of that already preleased but not yet delivered. Those deliveries in early 2023 will naturally lead to positive absorption and help rebalance the market.  A variety of industrial …

There is a lot of buzz about the dominance of e-commerce and its effects on the industrial market. Columbia has its fair share of retailers with e-commerce distribution facilities as Amazon, The Home Depot and Target all have major distribution centers in the Midlands region of South Carolina. However, retail distribution is not the main driver of this industrial market. The heart and soul of the central South Carolina industrial market is manufacturing. Manufacturing properties make up approximately 35 percent of the 70 million square feet of industrial product in the Columbia metropolitan statistical area. While the balance of space is classified as warehouse/distribution, a large portion of that is used to service manufacturers, pushing the total amount of manufacturing-related space well above 50 percent. Since 2013, the pace of South Carolina’s manufacturing job growth has been four times faster than the national growth rate. This manufacturing renaissance has created demand for Class B multipurpose buildings that have manufacturing infrastructure, such as heavy electric services, cranes, HVAC and support facilities including locker rooms, restrooms, cafeteria and parking to handle larger employee requirements. In the 1970s and 1980s, industrial buildings constructed in central South Carolina were part manufacturing facility and part …

Thirty years ago, there were 33 operating textile mills in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. Today, there are scarcely a handful. The jobs and investments disappeared in the wake of regulatory change and international trade agreements. However, the infrastructure, location, existing workforce and entrepreneurial attitude of the area’s leadership saw this as a challenge to evolve. And evolve it did — using the substrate of the textile industry as a solid foundation. The well-trained and manufacturing-oriented workforce, coupled with the existing manufacturing support base (specialty machinery fabrication including maintenance and constituent chemical suppliers), were readily adaptable to new and recast job opportunities. This was the canvas on which the area’s evolution would be painted. Specialty equipment, manufacturing, fabrication, chemical production and other vestiges of the textile industry have remained demand drivers for the Upstate market. They have been reconfigured in the form of investment and expansion by Milliken & Co., Toray Carbon Fiber, General Electric and Keurig Green Mountain. The existing manufacturing-oriented workforce, with its previous experience and mindset, were a prime reason BMW selected Spartanburg County as the home for its first North America production facility. BMW’s Plant Spartanburg and its vast supplier and related support network have emerged as …