Most commercial real estate advice arrives as a quarterly report that is already three months old by the time you read it. That is fine for context and useless for a decision on a specific building. This page sets out what we actually track, where it comes from, and how often it is refreshed, so you can judge for yourself how much weight to put on it.
What we subscribe to and what we do not
We use commercial listing and lease data services, public county records, and the free published research from the large brokerages. That last category matters: CBRE, JLL, Kidder Mathews, Cushman & Wakefield and Colliers all publish quarterly market reports at no cost, and we read all of them rather than relying on one.
We do not have a proprietary data feed that other brokerages lack, and we would be sceptical of any firm our size claiming otherwise. What we have is the discipline to read several sources rather than one, and enough local transaction experience to know when a published number does not match what is actually clearing.
The four things we watch
1. Transaction velocity, not just volume
How many deals closed matters less than how long they took and how far they moved from asking. A submarket where deals close in sixty days at 96% of asking is behaving differently from one where deals close in sixty days at 85%, even though the volume looks identical.
2. Tenant demand by size band
Aggregate absorption hides the thing owners actually need to know. Demand for 100,000 square foot distribution and demand for 8,000 square feet of flex are different markets that happen to share a property type. We track requirements by size band because that is how tenants actually search.
3. Supply pipeline
Permitted and under construction, not just delivered. This is public record and it is the most reliable forward indicator available for free. A submarket with nothing in the pipeline behaves very differently in eighteen months from one with two million square feet coming.
4. Asking versus effective rent
This is the gap that catches owners out in a correcting market. Asking rents update slowly because landlords are reluctant to reprint the flyer. Effective rents, after free rent and tenant improvement allowances, move much faster. In the current Southern California market the gap between the two is the single most important number, and it is not published anywhere. It comes from knowing what actually got signed.
Where the published sources disagree
A worked example. For Inland Empire industrial asking rents in Q2 2026, three credible sources give three different answers:
- Kidder Mathews: $0.98 per square foot per month NNN, 7.6% direct vacancy
- CBRE: $1.08 per square foot per month NNN, 7.4% vacancy, though this covers their IE Core submarket rather than the full Inland Empire
- CoStar data via the Riverside County EDA: $1.03 per square foot per month, with market-wide vacancy at 8.7% and availability at 11.9%
None of them is wrong. They draw the market boundary differently, count different building sets, and report different quarters. The spread is roughly 10%, which on a 50,000 square foot building is real money.
No model resolves that disagreement. Someone has to decide which comparable set actually describes your asset, and that is judgement rather than data. Anyone quoting you a single precise number for a whole region without saying whose data it is and what it covers has skipped that step.
How often this is refreshed
Published brokerage reports arrive quarterly and we read them as they land. Listing and availability data we check continuously, because that is where movement shows up first. Public permit records we review monthly.
What this means for you
If you own a building, the useful output is not a market report. It is a straight answer to three questions: where does your asset sit against what is actually clearing right now, what concessions is the market requiring, and is this the moment to lease, hold or sell. Sometimes that answer is wait, and we would rather give you that than a listing agreement.
Get in touch for a read on your specific property, or see what we currently have on the market.
Sources
- Kidder Mathews, Inland Empire Industrial Market Report, Q2 2026
- CBRE, Inland Empire Industrial Figures, Q2 2026
- CoStar data via Riverside County Economic Development Agency, February 2026
- National Association of Realtors, Commercial Real Estate Market Insights, May 2026
Market data current as of Q2 2026. Figures differ between sources because each firm defines market geography and building sets differently.