Mexicali together with Tijuana y Tecate, make up the northwestern border of the country and due to its proximity to California, they have received the impact of the demand exerted by the American market on the sector of warehouses and industrial buildings.

These markets as a whole group 13% of the industrial real estate inventory in Mexico, according to the real estate platform Solili.

2021 was a year where the search for industrial spaces in this market reached its highest level, which could not be exceeded with the accumulated demand of 2022.

Consult here: Chihuahua begins the year with strong dynamism of industrial demand

Mexicali accumulated in 2022 a gross demand that exceeds 82 thousand square meters and that goes from 500 square meters to 12.2 thousand square meters of lease. Of the total number of spaces that were requested, 56% corresponded to custom-made projects or BTS and the remaining percentage focused on speculative projects.

If we compare the performance of the market in 2019, the year before the pandemic, with what was accumulated in 2022, the recovery has been 6%.

Regarding the turns of the industrial buildings that were occupied, the logistics sector has great prominence as well as light manufacturing that have energized the markets of the Mexican border in recent quarters.

Just over half of the demand in Mexicali during 2022 was located on the Boulevard Lazaro Cardenas submarket and the remaining percentage is distributed between the Mexicali-San Luis Río Colorado and Aeropuerto-Garita 2 submarkets, to the west and east of Mexicali , respectively.

If the Solili platform is consulted at the end of January 2023, the availability on the Boulevard Lazaro Cardenas submarket shows 4 options for industrial buildings ranging from 3.2 to 10.5 thousand square meters.

At the end of January 2023, this border market exceeded 14,000 square meters of gross demand and managed to settle almost 28,000 square meters of new industrial buildings that managed to be incorporated into the inventory.

The industrial vacancy that had reached its lowest point in July 2022 with 0.97% managed to stop its decline and reached almost 2.5% at the end of January 2023. The advance of speculative constructions has influenced the downward adjustment of this indicator.

Of interest: Industrial demand forces industrial developers in Tijuana to almost triple construction

The total surfaces that were under construction in 2022 in Mexicali exceeded 280 thousand meters, which far exceeds the projects that were built during 2019, 2020 and 2021. This strong construction activity generated to satisfy the demand had an impact in rental prices that have risen 22% over the past year.

In January 2023, 21,000 square meters of new industrial buildings began, so we can anticipate a more active quarter, both on the construction side and on the demand side.