Queens, NY Industrial Market Update H1 2026

By the Numbers

• Total Dollar Volume: $293.4M (up 58% from $185.6M in H1 2025, largely driven by an institutional trade.* Volume was $201.4M exclude this transaction, up 9% from H1 2025).
• Number of Transactions: 45 deals over $1M (up from 33 in H1 2025).
• Average Price Per SF: $372 (a decrease from $419 in H1 2026 and $437 in H1 2024; pricing continues to soften despite climbing deal count).
• Average Deal Size: $4.6M (relatively flat to slights down from $5.6M in H1 2025).
• Buyer Trends: 62% of transactions were user-buyers, 50% of which were first-time buyers

 

Top Neighborhoods by Transaction Volume

1. Long Island City: 8
2. Maspeth: 5
3. College Point: 5
4. Sunnyside: 4
5. Glendale: 4

 

Three Key Takeaways

Rezonings Are Starting to Bite into Industrial Supply

Queens industrial pockets saw two of the city’s largest neighborhood rezonings in a generation, both approved by City Council in late 2025 and now moving into implementation. Industrial land is the natural target for this kind of upzoning.

• OneLIC (54 blocks, ~15,000 homes)
• Jamaica Neighborhood Plan (230 blocks, ~12,000 homes)

It’s under-built relative to its FAR, which is exactly where density can be unlocked. The agents counted 29 Queens industrial properties sold for development/land value in H1 2026, up from just 6 in H1 2025. They expect the trend to continue: the Mamdani administration is backing further site specific rezonings with ELURP, a new expedited review process which was approved by voters in Nov. 2025. This will cut the standard ULURP timeline from 7 months to 90 days. As industrial supply gets rezoned away, the remaining stock should see scarcity-driven appreciation, and adjacent, non-rezoned pockets picking up spillover foot traffic and infrastructure investment become candidates for the same adaptive reuse (warehouse-to-retail, creative, entertainment) that’s already reshaped Williamsburg, and is now reshaping LIC. The agents are currently running development feasibility studies (current zoning and ULURP/ELURP pathways) for a few hundred industrial owners across Queens and Brooklyn.

 

The Owner-User Premium Has Nearly Vanished

User-buyers paid a 10.7% $/SF premium over investors in 2024; real evidence of how aggressively users were competing for buildings. That premium has compressed every year since: down to 2.7% in 2025, and just 0.7% through H1 2026. The erosion is sharpest in larger buildings (10,000 SF+), where users are now paying 8–9% less per SF than investors. Smaller product still favors user-buyers, but even there the premium has faded.

The agents’ hypothesis: this is sellers losing leverage, not users pulling back.

A couple of years ago, investors had to win deals on speed and certainty (all-cash, no diligence contingencies, fast closings) while SBA-financed user-buyers had to pay up just to compete for the same buildings. That dynamic has flipped: asking prices across active listings have fallen roughly 6–7% since mid-2025, and fewer sellers are even adding new listings to test pricing, both signs leverage has shifted toward buyers, investor and user alike, which converges what each is willing to pay rather than letting one group pay up to win. It’s compounded by a real slowdown on the demand side: NYC industrial leasing activity has been running below historical norms, with landlords offering more concessions and large-format product in Queens specifically struggling to lease up. Fewer businesses in active expansion mode means a thinner pool of owner-user buyers, too.

 

Queens Is Where the Investors Are Buying

Queens industrial trades at a real discount to Brooklyn; $372/SF here vs. $488/SF across the river, a gap of roughly 24%. That lower basis, paired with the development and rezoning optionality reshaping the borough, gives investors a more favorable entry point than Brooklyn’s tighter, higher-priced stock, and the buyer mix shows it. 38% of Queens H1 2026 buyers were investors, almost double Brooklyn’s 20%.

The read: Queens is earlier in its cycle, and the buyers chasing basis and upside are concentrating here while owner-users still dominate the more mature Brooklyn market. Worth watching whether that investor share keeps climbing as rezonings play out, or whether pricing catches up to Brooklyn and compresses the opportunity that’s drawing them in.

*Data excludes self-storage transactions and deals under $1M. One institutional trade is excluded from the averages above.