The more things change, the more they stay the same. More than 150 years after the old French proverb was coined, industrial real estate professionals in Texas who have a penchant for philosophy may well be seeing its application play out in real time. While the industrial market has cooled from 2021 and early 2022, when insatiable demand drove record rent growth, there are still enough positive fundamentals within the space to counteract the likes of inflation, interest rate hikes and geopolitical uncertainty during an election year. Against that backdrop, owners and brokers are frequently reminded of how fortunate they are to be doing business in the Lone Star State. Muchos Gracias Job and population growth are the Letterman guests who need no introduction, as they have always driven expansion and value creation in Texas across all sects of commercial real estate. But as powerful as those drivers are, they’ve been there all along. In recent years, as disruption in debt markets has slowed industrial supply growth and inflation has put pressure on tenants’ costs of occupancy, other macro-level forces have also emerged to buoy the market. Specifically, the impacts of a growing concentration of manufacturing operations in Mexico have …
