Which vacancy rate should I actually trust?

None of them in isolation. JLL, CBRE and Knight Frank each measure a different building sample, grade mix and reporting period, so the useful exercise is comparing direction and city-to-city spread within one house's series, not picking a single number as the market rate.

Why is Perth's vacancy rate so much lower than Sydney's?

JLL's Q2 2026 figures put Perth at 2.2% against Sydney's 5.8%, the widest gap of the five capitals in that report. This page doesn't establish the underlying causes, but a market that tight generally means less negotiating room and a shorter time to secure space.

Does a falling vacancy rate mean rents are rising?

Not automatically, and none of the vacancy figures here include rent data. Vacancy and rent usually move together over time, but a single quarter's vacancy print isn't evidence of what rents are doing on its own.

How often does this data get updated?

Quarterly for JLL and Knight Frank, and roughly half-yearly for CBRE's headline release, which is why this page is reviewed and re-checked on the same rough cycle rather than treated as a one-off snapshot.

Is Warehouse Space Actually Hard to Find Right Now?

Every major property research house tracks Australian industrial vacancy, and none of them agree on the number. That's not a flaw in the data, it's because JLL, CBRE, Knight Frank and Colliers each measure a different slice of the market. Here's what each one actually found, city by city, as at mid-2026.

Last updated 2026-08-24

Four houses, four different readings

JLL's Q2 2026 industrial report, published 17 August 2026, puts national vacancy at 4.8% across an estimated 81.5 million square metres of stock. By city: Sydney 5.8%, Melbourne 4.9%, Brisbane 4.5%, Adelaide 3.8%, and Perth the tightest of the five at 2.2%. JLL also has 2.1 million square metres under construction nationally, most of it due for delivery over the following 18 months.

CBRE, reporting on the first half of 2026, puts national vacancy at 3.2%, which it describes as steady and below its own long-run equilibrium threshold of 4%. Its city figures for roughly the same period are lower across the board too: Sydney 3.5%, Melbourne 4.7%, Brisbane 3.0%. CBRE also reports national net absorption of more than 1.4 million square metres in the first half of 2026, more than double the second half of 2025.

Knight Frank, covering the east coast only, put vacancy at 3.9% for the first quarter of 2026, alongside transaction volumes of $7.1 billion for the first half of the year, up 23% on the year before and the strongest first half since 2022. Colliers doesn't publish a single comparable headline figure; its 2026 outlook instead describes vacancy as sitting near cyclical peaks through the year, with outer-ring locations overtaking infill markets for industrial investment transactions for the first time, at 54% of national transactions.

Why the same market gives four answers

None of these houses is wrong. They're measuring different things. JLL and CBRE track different building samples across different grade definitions, with prime, secondary and everything in between counted differently by each. Knight Frank's figure covers the east coast only, not the national market the others quote. And the reporting periods don't quite line up either: a Q1 figure, a Q2 figure and a first-half figure are all describing slightly different windows of a market that moved during that time.

The honest position is that there isn't one Australian industrial vacancy rate. There are several, each internally consistent within its own house's methodology and none of them directly comparable to the others. Treating any single figure as the market rate is the mistake, not picking the wrong house.

Where two research houses cover the same city for a roughly comparable period, the figures still diverge.
City	JLL — Q2 2026	CBRE — 1H 2026
Sydney	5.8%	3.5%
Melbourne	4.9%	4.7%
Brisbane	4.5%	3.0%

What each figure is actually useful for

JLL's spread is the widest useful comparison across capitals, because it's the only one of the four covering all five in the same report. CBRE's framing against its own 4% equilibrium threshold is more useful for reading whether the current market favours tenants or landlords than the raw percentage itself.

Knight Frank's number matters less on its own than alongside its supply-pipeline data: vacancy staying roughly flat while completions are genuinely falling is a different story to vacancy falling because demand is soft, and the reasons the pipeline itself is tightening say more about where rents go next than any single vacancy print does. Colliers' transaction-share data is really an investment-market signal, not an occupier one, useful for understanding where capital is moving rather than how easy your own search will be.

What this means if you're actually leasing

None of these figures tell you whether a shed that suits your business is available in your precinct this month, because all four are city or coast-wide averages across grades you may not want. A 5.8% Sydney vacancy rate from JLL can still mean close to nothing modern and well-located in the specific precinct you need, while older secondary space nearby sits empty. That gap matters most at peak trading periods, when even a loose annual average can turn into no available space at all.

What the disagreement between houses does tell you is that space is genuinely tighter in some grades and locations than the headline number suggests, and looser in others. That's worth knowing before assuming the trade-off between rent and location has moved the same amount everywhere. If you do find something workable, what the lease actually locks you into matters as much as whether the space existed in the first place, and racking already installed by a previous tenant carries its own removal and make-good questions regardless of what the vacancy data says.

A tighter market also changes the maths on staying put. Getting more pallet positions out of the footprint you already have is often cheaper than chasing scarce new space, particularly once you've actually worked out how much capacity your current site holds against what you assumed it held.

Common questions

Which vacancy rate should I actually trust?: None of them in isolation. JLL, CBRE and Knight Frank each measure a different building sample, grade mix and reporting period, so the useful exercise is comparing direction and city-to-city spread within one house's series, not picking a single number as the market rate.
Why is Perth's vacancy rate so much lower than Sydney's?: JLL's Q2 2026 figures put Perth at 2.2% against Sydney's 5.8%, the widest gap of the five capitals in that report. This page doesn't establish the underlying causes, but a market that tight generally means less negotiating room and a shorter time to secure space.
Does a falling vacancy rate mean rents are rising?: Not automatically, and none of the vacancy figures here include rent data. Vacancy and rent usually move together over time, but a single quarter's vacancy print isn't evidence of what rents are doing on its own.
How often does this data get updated?: Quarterly for JLL and Knight Frank, and roughly half-yearly for CBRE's headline release, which is why this page is reviewed and re-checked on the same rough cycle rather than treated as a one-off snapshot.

Sources

JLL — Industrial Real Estate Market Analysis, Q2 2026 — National and by-city vacancy figures for Q2 2026, published 17 August 2026.
CBRE — Australia's industrial and logistics vacancy remains steady at 3.2% — CBRE's national and city vacancy figures for the first half of 2026.
MHD Supply Chain — Industrial supply pipeline tightens across east coast, Knight Frank — East coast vacancy and supply pipeline figures attributed to Knight Frank, Q1 2026.

Part of our guide to the industrial property market.