NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. Two warehouses built on blasted rock in the remote Apex Industrial Park changed hands last month for more than $190 million, already leased to DHL. On paper, the sale reads like proof that Southern Nevada’s industrial market is still strong.
But a closer look at how the people who track that market are actually measuring it this fall tells a messier story. Three commercial real estate firms that publish quarterly reports on Las Vegas industrial space, CBRE, Cushman and Wakefield, and Lee and Associates, each reported a different vacancy rate for the same three months this summer. The spread between the highest and lowest of those estimates adds up to more floor space than the entire warehouse deal that prompted this review.
What Sold, and to Whom
The two buildings sit in Vantage North, a project developer VanTrust Real Estate built along Interstate 15 in the remote Apex Industrial Park, about 20 miles northeast of the Strip. County records show the two buildings were completed in 2023 and 2024.
Last month, VanTrust sold the pair to Artemis Real Estate Partners, a Washington, D.C.-area investment firm working with a partner called DIV Industrial, for $118.2 million and $74.2 million, a combined $192.4 million for roughly 1.2 million square feet. That works out to about $160 a square foot, well below the market’s $224.58 average sale price per square foot for industrial property in the same quarter, a discount of about 29 percent even though the buildings are among the newest in the Valley.
Both buildings were already leased to DHL, which will run them as a third-party logistics provider for a client the company has not named.
One Lease, an Outsized Footprint
Size the DHL space against the broader market and the numbers get striking fast. Lee and Associates counted 201.9 million square feet of industrial space across the Las Vegas Valley last quarter, with a 9.91% vacancy rate. Multiplying those two figures out, a calculation that appears nowhere in Lee’s own report, puts total vacant industrial space in the Valley at roughly 20 million square feet. The 1.2 million square feet DHL now occupies is about 6% of all of it, filled by a single lease.
Measured against market growth instead of market size, the lease looks even bigger. Cushman and Wakefield reported 757,487 square feet of net new absorption for the entire Las Vegas industrial market in the third quarter, the broker’s measure of how much more space tenants occupied at the end of the quarter than at the start. The DHL space alone is about 58% larger than that, meaning one lease, already signed before the quarter even started, is bigger than everything the rest of the market’s tenants added together during it.
Three Firms, Three Vacancy Rates
The brokers don’t agree on the baseline those comparisons rest on, either. CBRE, Cushman and Wakefield, and Lee and Associates each track the Las Vegas industrial market independently, using their own inventories of buildings and their own tenant data, and each published a different third-quarter vacancy rate within two weeks of one another this fall.
| Firm | Q3 2026 vacancy rate | Report published | Net absorption cited |
|---|---|---|---|
| CBRE | 8.7% | Oct. 8, 2026 | About 1.5 million sq ft (quarterly) |
| Cushman and Wakefield | 9.6% | Oct. 22, 2026 | 757,487 sq ft (quarterly) |
| Lee and Associates | 9.91% | October 2026 | 6,608,408 sq ft (trailing 12 months) |
The gap between the highest estimate, Lee’s 9.91%, and the lowest, CBRE’s 8.7%, is 1.21 percentage points. Applied to Lee’s own count of the market’s total size, that gap equals about 2.44 million square feet, floor space the two firms simply disagree about. That disagreement is itself more than twice the size of the entire 1.2 million square foot DHL deal that set off this comparison.
None of the three firms is necessarily wrong. Each tracks a somewhat different set of buildings and updates its inventory on its own schedule, which is a normal source of variation between commercial brokerages. But the size of the gap, in a single quarter, in a single metro area’s single property type, shows how much room for disagreement exists even in a market that produces a new report every three months.
Why the Market Looks Like This
VanTrust’s own read on the slowdown lines up with the broker data. Jenna Borcherding, the firm’s senior director of development, told the Review-Journal that Southern Nevada now has more empty industrial buildings than it did a year or two ago, that developers have pulled back on new projects, and that landlords have been offering months of free rent to attract tenants. She said VanTrust had plenty of inquiries on the two buildings before DHL signed, but “deals just weren’t getting done.”
CBRE’s own numbers back up the shift in direction, even if not the exact size of it. The firm’s 8.7% vacancy rate is down from a cycle-high 10.4% a year earlier, suggesting the market has been tightening, just not tightening at the pace Lee and Associates’ higher current estimate would suggest.
What Else Sold at Vantage North
- VanTrust bought roughly 350 acres at Apex in spring 2021 with plans for a 4.5 million square foot industrial campus, and ultimately built three buildings there.
- One of the three, leased to Saddle Creek Logistics Services, sold to Saddle Creek itself for nearly $97 million.
- Last summer, VanTrust sold about 205 acres of its original Vantage North land, never developed for warehouses, to Novva Data Centers for almost $181 million.
Between the Saddle Creek sale, the Novva land sale and this latest $192.4 million deal, VanTrust has now cashed out of nearly all of its original Vantage North investment, even as the broker reports it helped generate disagree on exactly how tight the market it built into has become.
