CHICAGO—US customers' online shopping habits may be cutting into the business of brick-and-mortar retail, but they are helping to propel the industrial real estate market to new heights. Developers will complete a historic amount of new space this year, much of it for product distributors and logistics firms, according to JLL's Industrial Outlook 2017. And as fast as these buildings have risen, tenants have filled the space, pushing vacancy rates to a 17-year low and rents through the roof.

In fact, Chicago-based JLL found that demand is outweighing supply and new construction is struggling to keep up. Adding the new deliveries from the past five years with the current construction pipeline, the US industrial market will add nearly one billion square feet to its inventory by 2018. Dallas, Inland Empire, Philadelphia, Denver and Atlanta were the top six markets, accounting for more than half of the new development starts in this year's first quarter.

“In my 30-plus years in the industry, this is the best we've seen,” Craig Meyer, president of JLL's industrial group, Americas, tells GlobeSt.com. “And it continues to have legs. Years from now, we will look back on this time as the good old days.”