Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio get talked about like one growth story. A fresh snapshot of advertised industrial and flex space says otherwise.
The statistic behind the Texas industrial headline
Here's the number that started this whole exercise: across a cleaned snapshot of about 8,000 publicly advertised industrial and flex offerings in Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio, three out of every four offerings with a stated size come in under 10,000 square feet. Add up all their square footage and it is about a fifth of the total advertised. Flip it around and a small slice of offerings at 25,000 square feet and up, under one in ten, accounts for roughly three fifths of the measured square footage.
That gap matters because metro-wide square-foot totals and average suite sizes are pulled toward the big end of the distribution, while the smaller end supplies most of the choices. If you are a tenant looking for 3,000 square feet, a broker fielding that tenant's call, an owner pricing a small-bay building, or a developer deciding what to build next, the metro-wide number may describe a warehouse many times larger than your requirement better than it describes your deal.
That's the tension underneath everything else in this piece: small suites dominate the shopping experience, big suites dominate the statistics, and the two rarely get separated in the way owners and tenants actually need.
Four cities and four leasing personalities
Lump Austin, DFW, Houston, and San Antonio together and you get a misleading average in every direction. Separate them and each one has a distinct commercial personality that shows up the moment you start comparing advertised asking rents by size.
Austin is the premium market, full stop—it posts the highest median asking rent in every size band we reviewed, from the smallest suites up through the largest. If you're comparing Texas markets on a spreadsheet, Austin is the column that makes the others look cheap, and it earns that position at every size, not just on average.
Houston is the volume market. It has more advertised offerings than any other metro in this snapshot, and its typical advertised suite runs smaller than the other three. Houston's marketed suite mix is different, not merely larger in total.
Dallas-Fort Worth lands on the same headline median asking rent as Houston, but the suite mix is different. DFW's typical advertised suite runs larger, so the same $12 median sits behind a different set of choices.
San Antonio sits between the extremes overall, but its curve is not flat. At the larger end, asking rents fall sharply enough that we treat the result as directional rather than settled because the mix of marketed large spaces can move the number. Even with that caution, San Antonio shows the steepest discount-with-size pattern of the four.
| Metro | Median asking rent | Median suite size | What stands out | |---|---:|---:|---| | Austin | $16.00 | 4,920 SF | Premium at every size band | | Dallas-Fort Worth | $12.00 | 4,056 SF | Shares Houston's median, larger suite mix | | Houston | $12.00 | 3,500 SF | Most offerings, smallest typical suite | | San Antonio | $13.50 | 4,800 SF | Steep, directional discount at larger sizes |
Where asking-rent spreads widen
Zoom past the metro level into individual cities and the asking-rent spread gets wider. Georgetown and McKinney post some of the highest advertised medians in the snapshot, with Leander, Dripping Springs, Katy, and Tomball not far behind. The marketed premiums are large enough to affect underwriting and tenant budgets.
At the other end, Humble, Denton, Forney, Grand Prairie, Haltom City, and the city of Houston show meaningfully lower advertised asking rents. These are the places to examine when a tenant's monthly occupancy cost or an investor's going-in yield matters more than the premium attached to a growth-ring address.
What this snapshot measures
Worth being precise about what all of this is and isn't. This is a snapshot of publicly advertised offerings and their asking rents—landlord pricing posture and marketed choice, not signed deals. It says nothing about vacancy, absorption, competition for space, or what tenants are actually paying once a lease gets negotiated. Asking rent is the number on the sign, not the number on the check.
It is also a single moment in time, not a trend line. Several property details that would sharpen the comparison, including clear height, office finish, lease structure, power, loading, parking, and yard, are reported inconsistently. That is why this first piece focuses on size and geography.
Why this becomes more useful every month
A single snapshot tells you what the market looks like right now. A repeated one starts telling you where it's heading. Running this as a monthly Texas Triangle series means the next update won't just restate today's numbers—it will show which offerings disappeared, which new ones appeared, and where asking rents moved between snapshots, metro by metro and size band by size band. That's the version of this data that starts to feel less like a photograph and more like a market you can actually watch.
This first snapshot is the baseline everything else gets measured against. The next one is where it gets interesting.
Explore the broader property, supply, and demand picture through SpanVor's Texas Industrial Data Atlas.
Scope note: SpanVor combined four metro workbooks dated August 25–26, 2026 and removed 100 exact duplicates appearing in both the Austin and San Antonio files. The figures describe publicly advertised offerings and asking rents, not executed leases, vacancy, absorption, or measured demand.
Written by Jason Probert, Founder of SpanVor — Industrial Property Intelligence.