Two Brokerages, Two DFW Vacancy Rates for Q3. Here's Why That Gap Matters to Your Next Lease

Pull the Q3 2026 reports for DFW industrial and you will not get one vacancy number. Cushman & Wakefield has the market at 7.3%, the lowest reading since Q3 2023. CBRE says 7.8%, down from 8.2% in Q2 and 8.9% a year ago. Lee & Associates lands right around 8.0%, versus 9.5% a year earlier. Savills has it at 8.3%, down 100 basis points on the quarter and 180 year over year. Four firms, four numbers, a full point of spread, and every one of them says vacancy is falling. The argument is about the level, not the direction.

Most of the gap is methodology. Different firms count different building sets, treat sublease space differently, and draw the size cutoff in different places. Some count under-construction product in the inventory base and some do not. None of that is a scandal, but if you're sitting across from a landlord's broker, you should know which number he's quoting and why he picked it. Nobody leads with the one that hurts their case.

Rent has the same problem. Kidder Mathews put average direct NNN asking rent at $9.34 per square foot in Q2, up 2.6% year over year. By Q3, Matthews had it at a record $10.36, CBRE's figure ran about $10.39, and Lee & Associates listed $9.93. Pick the source that flatters your argument and the market looks tighter or looser depending on which one you quote.

Absorption shows the same split. Savills logged 13.6 million square feet of net absorption in Q3 and 35.7 million year to date, with Amazon among the big move-ins. CBRE counted 6.4 million for the quarter, down about 34% from Q2 but up 17.5% from a year earlier. Very different pictures if you only read one, but both agree leasing is strong: CBRE had Q3 leasing at 23.5 million square feet, its best quarter in a three-year window.

Here's the number I'd put on the conference room table. CBRE has roughly 33.9 million square feet under construction, the most of any US market, with JLL putting the figure around 31 million. That's a lot of new product coming at a market trending toward the high 7s on vacancy. Landlords with finished, available space know their window to push rent is open now, and they know it may not stay open once that pipeline delivers.

So what does a tenant actually do with four different vacancy numbers and three different rent figures? Stop treating the metro average as your market. A 7.3% to 8.3% range blends 200,000-square-foot bulk distribution in Alliance with 15,000-square-foot flex in Garland, and your building competes with neither average. Ask for the vacancy and absorption in your size band and your submarket, then ask what's actually available and move-in ready in it. That list is usually short, and short lists are where landlords get comfortable.

Second, chase effective rent, not asking rent. Asking rent is a landlord's wish. Effective rent, after free rent, TI allowance, and escalations, is the deal that actually closed. If your broker can't hand you a comp set of recent signed deals in your size range and submarket, with effective rents and concessions, within a few days, find a different broker.

Third, ask about sublease space by name. A building can show as fully leased in the headline vacancy number while a tenant quietly puts half of it on the sublease market. That space often rents at a discount and can be your best leverage in a submarket that otherwise looks tight on paper.

My read: the market is tightening at the margin, new supply is the wild card, and the tenants who do well over the next two quarters are the ones who start early, test more than two buildings, and bring their own comps instead of arguing over whose vacancy number is right. If your lease expires inside 18 months, the half-point spread between these brokerages is a reminder that the only vacancy rate that matters is the one for your own search.