CHICAGO—The Chicago industrial market just had one of its best quarters ever, capping off what had already been a solid year. Tenants absorbed another 7.1 million square feet of space, according to a year-end report from Newmark Grubb Knight Frank. That brought positive net absorption for 2016 up to 15.3 million square feet, close to the 15.6 million square feet absorbed in 2015. And developers have been hard-pressed to keep up with this robust demand. In the fourth quarter they added another 6.3 million square feet of space to the region's inventory.

The market has now seen 27 consecutive quarters of growth. Five or six years ago, if you asked experts that study or work in the market whether such an extended run of good news was possible, most probably would have said no.

“When you stand back and look at those numbers, it's kind of amazing,” Corey Chase, an industrial broker with NGKF, tells GlobeSt.com. And not only has the vacancy rate been cut roughly in half since the height of the recession, it has continued to sink in spite of all the new construction. During the fourth quarter, the rate went from 7.9% to 7.6%, the lowest rate in more than ten years.