From Sean Perrier's vantage point in Southern California, industrial demand isn’t cooling — it's recalibrating.
Pricing and expectations are searching for a new center of gravity after years of breakneck growth across the United States. The biggest challenge, he said, is figuring out what tenants can and will pay.
“The most important thing is understanding where true market rents are,” Perrier told CoStar News. “There’s still a lot of uncertainty in that.”
Perrier joined Lincoln Property Co. last month to scout for acquisitions and development opportunities across Southern California’s industrial markets, where conditions have softened unevenly after years of rapid expansion.
In Los Angeles, occupancy slipped again in the first quarter, pushing vacancy up to 6.6% as asking rents moved lower at a time of added supply, according to CoStar data. Space is also taking longer to lease, particularly in port‑adjacent Southern California areas such as Vernon, Commerce and the City of Industry, where older logistics buildings have struggled to retain tenants.
The Inland Empire, California's busiest industrial region, tells a slightly different story: Demand for space has turned positive, but vacancy still sits at 9%, above the national average vacancy of 7.5% and leaving the leverage with tenants even as new construction slows.
That mix of softer rents, slower leasing and specific area volatility has made pricing far more granular. Perrier said deals now hinge less on broad rent growth and more on getting the micro right — what a tenant will actually pay in a given pocket, not what it paid a year ago.
At Lincoln Property, Perrier isn’t chasing pristine, fully leased buildings at peak pricing. Instead, he’s targeting older infill properties, mid‑bay warehouses and logistics hubs where rents can be reset, vacancy addressed or operations improved.
If the strategy works, success will be straightforward to measure.
“Three or four deals closed within a year," Perrier said. “That’s a good barometer.”
Seeking investments
Perrier is also competing in a crowded lane. Industrial investors including Rexford, Link Logistics, Dermody, NorthPoint and Clarion Partners are chasing similar value-oriented deals, often with a greater ability to stretch on price.
That competition has helped move the market off its peak, but it hasn’t fully resolved pricing. Values have adjusted, yet the gap between what buyers are underwriting and what sellers expect remains an obstacle.
“Where we want to buy and where sellers want to sell — it’s still a little off,” Perrier said.
Perrier comes to the challenge with a mix of academic training and hands-on experience. He studied real estate in college in Texas before gravitating toward industrial properties, first interning at CBRE in Dallas and later joining the firm’s West Coast team as a financial analyst. He went on to spend several years at Newport Beach-based CT Realty, working across acquisitions, development and dispositions of large-scale industrial projects throughout Southern California.
That background is shaping how he evaluates opportunities at Lincoln. One model already exists in the firm’s portfolio: a cluster of roughly 10 industrial buildings the company acquired over the past several years near Ontario, California. The properties range from about 50,000 to more than 250,000 square feet and span multiple vintages and tenant profiles, stitched together within a high-demand logistics corridor.
Perrier said the Inland Empire portfolio reflects the type of industrial real estate Lincoln aims to pursue: infill assets with functional warehouse space, and a blend of stabilized cash flow and value-add upside in one of the country’s deepest logistics markets.
Opportunity may also lie ahead on the development side. With new supply pipelines shrinking, Perrier expects some landowners to become more willing sellers, opening the door to new industrial projects in undersupplied pockets of Southern California.
Still, the backdrop remains fragile. Interest rates, global trade dynamics and port activity all feed directly into tenant demand, making industrial less predictable than it might appear.
That uncertainty sits against Lincoln Property’s broader push into the sector. Long known for office and multifamily, the Dallas-based firm now manages more than 720 million square feet of commercial properties globally and has been steadily expanding its industrial platform. Lincoln owns 161 industrial properties across the U.S., according to CoStar data.