The outlook for the Kansas City industrial market? According to the latest predictions by Newmark, it’s highly positive.
In its fourth quarter 2025 Kansas City industrial market report, Newmark said that this region saw 218,829 square feet of positive net absorption in the fourth quarter of last year. That capped off a year in which the Kansas City-area industrial market recorded a total of 8.4 million square of positive net absorption.
This makes Kansas City one of the stronger industrial markets in the United States heading in the early months of 2026. As Newmark says in its report, while many industrial markets across the United States recorded negative net absorption in the second and third quarters of last year, Kansas City did not. That highlights this market’s importance as a centralized intramodal hub.
Because of this, Newmark projects “tailwinds” for the Kansas City industrial market in 2026.
In other good news, the Kansas City industrial market’s vacancy rate fell 40 basis points year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2025, falling to 5%. Kansas City ranked fourth in lowest aggregate vacancy rate in the fourth quarter among the top 30 U.S. industrial markets.
As with most markets, new construction is muted. Newmark said that 6.4 million square feet of new industrial space is in the pipeline in the Kansas City market. More than 75% of this space is dedicated to build-to-suit projects. This includes Panasonic’s 2.35-million-square-foot project, the 850,510-square-foot Precision Vehicles Holdings development and Amazon’s 630,000-square-foot distribution center.
For 2026, Newmark is predicting that the Kansas City industrial market’s vacancy rate will fall to 4.5%, fueled by steady demand and a slowing speculative pipeline.
Newmark also said that it expects rent growth to continue to climb in 2026. This would seem to be safe bet: Industrial average asking rents in the Kansas City market have increased a record 33% since the fourth quarter of 2018. Newmark says that both asking and contract rates are likely to remain above pre-pandemic levels at $6 a square foot and higher.
Newmark says that the there won’t be a boom of speculative industrial construction in the Kansas City market this year. But it does predict that spec construction here will trend upward in 2026 at a measured pace. Spec construction projects now underway include VanTrust’s 577,500-square-foot Building IV at Raymore Commerce Center and Panattoni’s 469,310-square-foot Building I at Crossroads Commerce Center in Gardner, Kansas.
