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Smaller lease deals drive Central Pennsylvania’s core industrial market

 By Brenda Nguyen CoStar Analytics

Industrial space availability trends across South Central Pennsylvania— spanning Harrisburg, Lancaster, York, Reading, Lebanon and Gettysburg—reveal a growing disconnect between development patterns and tenant demand.

Developers continue to build big facilities geared for single users, but tenants are leasing small-bay facilities, creating uneven market conditions across building size segments.

Small-bay industrial properties, those measuring under 50,000 square feet, remain the most in-demand segment, with availability holding near 3.5% in 2026. Industrial buildings measuring between 50,000 and 100,000 square feet also show tight conditions, with availability at 4.5%. Limited new construction in these two size categories, combined with steady demand from local and regional users, continues to support lower vacancy rates.

Over the past three years, approximately 530 industrial leases were signed in this six-county region, with 88%, or about 470 leases, signed for spaces smaller than 100,000 square feet. This sustained demand has kept vacancy compressed in smaller formats, even as overall supply has expanded.

Availability rises sharply with building size. Mid-sized industrial properties, those between 100,000 and 249,999 square feet, have availability above 10%, while availability in buildings between 250,000 and 499,999 square feet has reached approximately 12.3%.

Buildings larger than 500,000 square feet now have the most availability, at roughly 13.7% in mid-2026, surpassing the 250,000 to 499,999 square foot segment in recent quarters.

Although large leases often dominate headlines, they account for a small share of actual demand. Over the same three-year period, only 13 leases, about 2.5% of total transactions, exceeded 500,000 square feet. These large-block leases tend to occur irregularly, creating sharp swings in vacancy when they are signed or when a building in this size quotient is delivered vacant.

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York emerges as South-Central Pennsylvania’s fastest-growing industrial hub

By Brenda Nguyen CoStar Analytics

Industrial development across South Central Pennsylvania has concentrated in three primary markets—York, Harrisburg, and Reading—driven largely by three factors: highway connectivity, proximity to major Northeast population centers, and access to Foreign Trade Zone 147, which spans all six markets in the region.

York leads by a meaningful margin, adding 12.5 million square feet of industrial space since 2020, with another 3.1 million square feet under construction. This sustained development pipeline reinforces York’s role as the region’s fastest-growing industrial hub, which has grown by 13% over the past five years, well ahead of the national average growth rate of 10.3%.

York also recorded the strongest population gain in Pennsylvania last year, supporting a deeper labor pool for companies expanding in the market. Combined with its position as a key logistics gateway to Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., York continues to attract large-scale distribution users.

Harrisburg and Reading follow closely behind, underscoring expansion patterns along major freight corridors. Harrisburg has added roughly 11.0 million square feet of industrial space since 2020, with 1.2 million square feet underway. About 9.9 million square feet was added in Reading in the same timeframe, making it the region’s largest active pipeline at 3.6 million square feet.

All three markets benefit from their exposure to FTZ 147, which allows companies to reduce or defer import duties and operate with greater flexibility across manufacturing, storage, and distribution.

Lancaster, Lebanon, and Gettysburg have seen comparatively limited industrial development since 2020, largely due to structural constraints rather than a lack of demand.

Lancaster and Lebanon each added just over 5 million square feet since 2020, but have minimal development underway. In Lancaster, agricultural land preservation limits the availability of large-scale sites. Meanwhile, Lebanon is constrained by limited water and wastewater infrastructure, aging sites that require costly redevelopment, and strong community resistance to large-scale projects that threaten agricultural land.

Gettysburg remains the smallest market, with about 1 million square feet of industrial space added and no active development projects. Together, these dynamics underscore how infrastructure, land availability, and labor access shape where industrial growth occurs.

These markets are also farther from key freight corridors, limiting their appeal to large distribution users. While they fall within the FTZ 147 service area and share its customs benefits, those advantages carry less weight without the infrastructure to support large-scale logistics operations.

As a result, tenant demand continues to concentrate in the infrastructure-rich hubs of York, Harrisburg, and Reading, while Lancaster, Lebanon, and Gettysburg support more localized, incremental growth.

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Vanguard deepens nationwide push to slash office space

By Katie Burke CoStar News

The Vanguard Group is cutting ties with one of its Philadelphia-area offices, the latest move by the global investment adviser to trim its corporate real estate portfolio.

The Malvern, Pennsylvania-based firm opted not to renew the lease on its nearly 88,000-square-foot space at 45 Liberty Blvd., one of several properties it occupies that comprise its headquarters. It is the latest in a string of cuts the company has made to consolidate its national office presence, echoing moves by other large tenants across the United States as they look to adjust to evolving post-pandemic needs.

“Vanguard continuously evaluates the effective use of workspace in our leased and owned properties,” a Vanguard representative said in a statement to CoStar News. “As part of this effort, we are exiting our leased space at 45 Liberty Blvd. to optimize our existing footprint.”

The firm's looming exit is expected to spike the 155,000-square-foot building's vacancy rate to about 65% after years of being fully occupied. Vanguard's current lease is set to expire later this month.

The investment adviser's Malvern headquarters has long been spread across several properties in the Philadelphia suburb. The bulk of Vanguard's 20,000-person global workforce is based in the region, and despite its planned Liberty Boulevard exit, it still occupies just shy of 1.4 million square feet of office space there.

Yet similar to a cohort of tenants elsewhere across the country, Vanguard's decision to cut ties with some of its Malvern space is ultimately a result of reevaluating spatial needs and eliminating anything that has since become extraneous.

Vanguard is also letting go of one of its leases in Scottsdale, Arizona, where it is one of the region's largest employers. The firm had fully occupied the 123,340-square-foot building at 8501 E. Raintree Drive for the past two decades. In a sign of the national office market's strengthening recovery, the space is already set to be backfilled by mobile network provider Consumer Cellular.

Back in Malvern, the owner of 45 Liberty Blvd., FLD Group, is in talks with a prospective tenant to fill about 65,000 square feet of Vanguard's looming vacancy, according to a CMBS loan report.

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