CHICAGO—The Chicago region's industrial market rebounded dramatically in the second quarter as vacancy, absorption, leasing and the level of new construction activity improved from the prior quarter, according to a recent report from Colliers International. In fact, the market has put up such solid, consistent numbers that some experts say we're now in a historic time.

“I tell my clients that this is the strongest landlord market in 30 years,” Jack Rosenberg, Colliers' Chicago-based national director for logistics and transportation, tells GlobeSt.com. He highlights the fact that while deliveries of major build-to-suit construction projects have been largely steady since 2008, albeit with a blip or two in 2010 and 2012, “now we're seeing speculative construction come back in a big way and it's happening all across the US.”

In 2010 and 2011, for example Chicago-area developers did not deliver a single speculative project of more than 300,000 square feet. But in 2013 developers finished 1.83 million square feet of such projects, and this number jumped to 3.3 million by 2014, Colliers found. And most impressively, in the first half of this year, developers have already completed more than 2 million square feet of these “big-box” projects.