Industrial, Retail, and Multifamily in Northeast Ohio

09/14/2026 | Rubber City Appraisal Studio, LLC | Industrial, Multifamily, Retail

Where Things Stand in Mid-September 2026

Rubber City Appraisal Studio, LLC | September 14, 2026

Two months ago we walked through the same three sectors using first-quarter data. Second-quarter numbers are now published, the summer transaction record is in, and the picture has sharpened in a way that is worth writing down before the third-quarter reports land in October.

The short version: industrial is the healthiest of the three and is being priced that way. Retail is quietly the most stable sector in the region, which is not a sentence anyone would have written in 2019. Multifamily has strong occupancy and weak transaction volume at the same time, which is a harder combination to appraise than either strength or weakness alone.

Here is the detail.

Industrial

The fundamentals tightened again

Cushman & Wakefield and CRESCO put Cleveland industrial vacancy at 3.8 percent in the second quarter of 2026, down from 3.9 percent in the first quarter. Year-to-date net absorption reached 1,156,291 square feet, with roughly 427,000 square feet of that in the second quarter alone. Overall asking rent came in at $5.68 per square foot, down three cents from the first quarter.

Construction has stayed disciplined. There was 957,547 square feet under construction at quarter’s end, with 620,166 square feet delivered in the quarter, most of it build-to-suit rather than speculative. Fifteen projects remain in the pipeline.

Submarket spread matters here. Stark County posted the tightest fundamentals in the region at 2.4 percent vacancy. Portage County was the loosest at 6.6 percent. The Southeast submarket led both leasing and sales, with 26 leases totaling 596,362 square feet.

Labor market context supports it. Cleveland-area employment sits at roughly 1.1 million with unemployment at 3.6 percent, well under the national 4.2 percent.

A caution on which vacancy number you cite

This is the same methodological conflict we flagged in July, and it has not resolved. Cushman & Wakefield and CRESCO report vacancy in the high threes. Newmark, using a broader inventory definition that includes smaller and older buildings, reported 6.3 percent in the first quarter. Marcus & Millichap, working from a third dataset, describes vacancy as having risen 80 basis points over the trailing twelve months.

All three can be defensible. None of them are interchangeable. If you are supporting a stabilized vacancy conclusion in a report, name the source, name the inventory definition, and do not average across brokerages to split the difference. An averaged number belongs to nobody and cannot be defended on cross-examination.

Investment sales hit a decade high

CoStar reported on August 18 that the Cleveland market recorded roughly $1.1 billion in total commercial transactions in the first half of 2026, with industrial and retail investment reaching decade highs while office and multifamily stayed subdued.

The second-quarter trades that matter as comparables:

Property	Buyer	SF	Price	Implied $/SF
8989 Lake Rd, Seville (Westfield Commerce Park)	Glen Una Investment	449,280	$48.21M	~$107
8796 Independence Pkwy, Twinsburg	STAG Industrial	280,464	$34.28M	~$122
22000 Alexander Rd, Oakwood Village	Realty Income	279,000	$39.1M	~$140

The per-square-foot figures are arithmetic from the reported price and area, not published transaction metrics. The Seville deal was the largest industrial trade in the Cleveland market in three years.

Note who is buying. Glen Una, STAG, and Realty Income are all institutional or net-lease platform capital. That is a meaningful shift from the local-ownership pattern that characterized this market for decades, and it generally compresses cap rates for the specific product type these buyers want: modern, single-tenant, credit-leased, reasonable clear height.

At the other end of the quality spectrum, 3113 W. 110th Street in Cleveland sold on August 17 for $1,350,000, or $22.05 per square foot, on 61,200 square feet. A 1948 building, six docks, twelve to thirteen foot clear. The buyer plans renovation and re-lease.

That spread, roughly $22 per square foot for functionally obsolete 1940s stock against $107 to $140 for modern product, is the whole story of this market in two data points. Industrial is not uniformly strong. Modern industrial is strong. Old industrial is a renovation play priced accordingly.

What is being built and what is being announced

Gateway 55 in Slavic Village would put a 166,000 square foot multi-tenant industrial building at 3000 East 55th Street near Opportunity Corridor Boulevard. Premier Development Partners is the developer, on a 15-acre site, with construction potentially starting in 2027. The incentive stack includes a 100 percent property tax abatement on improvements for 30 years plus a non-school TIF.

The Midline, announced in May, targets 350-plus acres on the near East Side for up to 1.5 million square feet of industrial and commercial space and 2,500-plus direct jobs. The City pitched it to the Site Selectors Guild conference in Cleveland on September 12. No commitments have been announced.

On the capital side, Geis Companies closed a $77.5 million refinancing on July 28 for the first completed building at Turnpike Commerce Center in Shalersville, a one-million-square-foot, 40-foot-clear facility. A10 Capital was the lender. That is the first building in a planned 470-acre, eight-building park.

The demand story behind the numbers

On September 8, GE Aerospace announced it will acquire Consolidated Precision Products for $11.75 billion from Warburg Pincus and Berkshire Partners. CPP was founded in Cleveland in 1991, operates more than 20 facilities in Cleveland and surrounding suburbs, and employs roughly 6,600 people. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval.

It is too early to know what it means for the region’s industrial footprint. Acquisitions of this size produce consolidation as often as expansion. But 6,600 jobs across 20-plus local facilities is the largest single ownership change affecting Cuyahoga County industrial demand in years, and it belongs on every watch list in the market.

Retail

Stable, tight, and cheap

Matthews Real Estate’s Cleveland retail report for the second quarter, published August 19, puts the picture plainly:

Vacancy 4.9 percent
Asking rent $16.15 per square foot, up 0.5 percent year over year
Net absorption 16,800 square feet
Deliveries 13,800 square feet; under construction 106,000 square feet
Sales volume $77.4 million; average price $115 per square foot; average cap rate 8.8 percent

Read that construction line again. The region delivered less retail space in the quarter than it absorbed. That is the entire explanation for sub-5 percent vacancy in a sector everyone declared dead a decade ago. Nobody has built speculative retail here in years, demand stopped shrinking, and the arithmetic did the rest.

Rent growth of 0.5 percent tells you landlords are taking occupancy over rate. An 8.8 percent average cap rate tells you the capital markets still do not believe the fundamentals.

The benchmark trade

Westwood Town Center in Rocky River sold in mid-July for $28.2 million, or $124.69 per square foot, on 226,155 square feet. KPR Centers of New York bought it from Zeisler Morgan Properties. The center was 95 percent occupied with about 10,650 square feet vacant across two units. Home Depot accounts for roughly 30 percent of income with a recently extended lease, Marc’s roughly 25 percent. JLL Capital Markets brokered.

This remains the operative retail comparable for grocery-and-necessity anchored suburban product in Northeast Ohio, and it has been cited across the local brokerage community all summer. Use it, but use it carefully: a 95 percent occupied center with an extended Home Depot lease is close to a best-case credit profile for this region. It is a ceiling comp, not a middle-of-the-market one.

The other end of the market

Two Mahoning Valley trades are worth more attention than their size suggests.

A Walgreens at 5501 Mahoning Avenue in Austintown closed September 2 for $3.2 million. F.W.W. Capital Group of Canfield bought it from a Cole net-lease entity in Phoenix. The building was constructed in 2002 and Walgreens remains in operation. It last sold in 2013 for $4.63 million.

That is a 31 percent nominal decline over 13 years on an occupied, operating drugstore. In real terms the decline is considerably worse. If you are appraising single-tenant pharmacy anywhere in the region, that is your reversion risk in one line.

A retail plaza at 4010 Boardman-Canfield Road in Canfield sold for $950,000 against an auditor’s appraised value of $771,630. Tenants include a Pella showroom and an insurance office; a restaurant tenant had closed the prior year.

Reuse is now the default, not the exception

The pattern we described in July has continued through the summer:

Shaker Square: the Cleveland City Planning Commission approved a redesign on August 7. Owners Cleveland Neighborhood Progress and Burten, Bell, Carr Development have put more than $5 million into capital improvements since the 2022 purchase. The plan reconfigures parking, activates green space, widens the promenade, and prioritizes ground-floor retail with creative and service uses above.
Former Rite Aid boxes across the Mahoning Valley: three footprints in the 11,000 to 15,000 square foot range. The Columbiana building is being studied for subdivision into five small retail spaces. The Cornersburg location is slated for demolition and replacement with a Sheetz.
Brunswick Hills Township: Sleepy Hollow Market and Rico’s Bar & Grill, 5,200 square feet at 2173-2175 Pearl Road, close September 30 after 20 years. A Rise Dispensary operated by Green Thumb Industries has been proposed for the site with $1.5 to $2 million in renovations, pending township zoning updates and a traffic study.
Orange Village: the former Bahama Breeze site at 3900 Orange Place was cleared for a lighting showroom with design-center businesses and second-floor offices. Council approved two setback variances 5-0 on September 9.
Great Northern Mall in North Olmsted remains rezoned for residential alongside retail, with no developer or timeline publicly announced.

The valuation consequence is the same in every one of these cases. Highest and best use for second-tier retail real estate in Northeast Ohio is increasingly not retail. When you reconcile a shopping center, you are reconciling an income approach against a land-and-conversion scenario, and the conversion scenario wins more often than it did five years ago.

Multifamily

Strong operations, thin trading

This is the sector where the data tells two stories at once.

Matthews Real Estate’s Cleveland multifamily report for the second quarter, published August 14, reports:

Vacancy 3.68 percent, down 90 basis points from the first quarter, with the tightest submarkets at 2.2 to 2.3 percent
Average asking rent $1,451 per month
Rent growth +2.88 percent year over year, decelerating from +4.80 percent in the first quarter
Under construction 1,430 units, just 0.82 percent of inventory
Trailing-twelve-month deliveries 1,481 units, essentially flat year over year
Trailing-twelve-month sales volume $297.4 million, down 10.4 percent year over year
Price per unit $78,300, down 0.4 percent year over year
Average cap rate 8.01 percent, up from 7.96 percent a year earlier

Matthews also notes that Cleveland’s construction pipeline “has all but disappeared,” with minimal permitting activity, and expects vacancy to stay tight through 2026 despite flat employment growth.

Operations are excellent. Trading is not. A market that absorbs everything it builds, holds vacancy under 4 percent, and still sees transaction volume fall 10 percent year over year has a bid-ask problem, not a demand problem. Sellers are underwriting the occupancy. Buyers are underwriting the 8 percent cap rate. Until one of them moves, volume stays thin and every appraiser in the region works with a shallower comparable set than the fundamentals would suggest.

Do not blend the rent numbers

Yardi Matrix reported Cleveland’s average advertised rent at $1,246 in its April 2026 report, with 2.8 percent year-over-year growth and 94.5 percent stabilized occupancy. Matthews reports $1,451.

Those are not contradictory. They are different inventory universes: Yardi Matrix tracks a defined set of larger stabilized properties, Matthews captures a wider slice. Both are usable. Blending them produces a number that describes no actual set of buildings.

Nationally, for context, Yardi put the average advertised asking rent at $1,773 in August 2026, up 0.4 percent year over year, with July occupancy at 94.2 percent, down 50 basis points annually. Cleveland’s 2.88 percent rent growth is materially outperforming a national market that is essentially flat.

The construction pipeline is not thin where it counts

The 1,430-unit under-construction figure understates what is actually in motion, because much of the regional pipeline is in adaptive reuse and has only recently started. A partial list from the last six weeks:

Akron. Welty Development started construction September 10 on CitiCenter at 146 South High Street, a $37 million, 115-unit conversion of the 95-year-old former YWCA. Average rent is projected at $1,398. The purchase price was reduced to $769,210 from an original $1 million because of water damage. Completion is targeted for January 2028. Brownfield grants and state historic preservation tax credits were both essential to the capital stack. Huntington Tower, a 28-floor, 200-unit, $68.8 million conversion with $4.55 million in historic tax credits, is in the same downtown pipeline, along with Quaker Square, the Beacon Journal building, and the Bowery.

Cleveland. The East Stokes tower at 10700 Chester Avenue received its first construction permit September 8. It is 24 stories, 267 feet, 281 apartments, 315 structured parking spaces, and roughly 17,682 square feet of ground-floor retail. First-phase cost is $24 million, with up to $140 million in taxable lease revenue bonds authorized in July. Target completion is June 2028.

Erieview Tower closed its financing on September 8: roughly $217.6 million in total capital to convert the 40-story 1964 tower into a 210-key W Cleveland hotel plus 215 W Apartments. The stack includes a $93.4 million Nuveen Green Capital C-PACE loan, a $20 million ERIEBANK senior loan, federal historic tax credit equity, a county hotel support loan, Ohio Brownfield funds, city abatement, TIF, and Port Authority incentives.

The Warner & Swasey Building on Carnegie near East 55th is under reconstruction as a $64 million, 140-unit project by Pennrose and MidTown Inc., with rents of $550 to $1,400 targeting 30 to 60 percent AMI. Leasing applications open in fall 2027.

Tremont Treehouse at 2291 Professor Street is a 45-unit, $13 million project from The Dalad Group and Property Advisors Group, with financing expected to close by November and groundbreaking by year end.

The Port of Cleveland approved financing for three suburban projects on September 10: $50 million in lease revenue bonds for The Allium in Middleburg Heights, $25 million for a 132-key dual-branded Hampton and Home2 Suites in Strongsville, and $20 million for Belle Oaks Phase 1B in Richmond Heights, which adds 270 residential units toward a full project of 798 units, 105,000 square feet of retail, and a 157,000 square foot Meijer on the former Richmond Mall site.

Mentor. Uptown Mentor breaks ground September 25 on a $10 million-plus, 45-unit project with more than 14,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial at 8677 Mentor Avenue, supported by a 30-year TIF beginning in 2028.

The trades that did happen

They were small. A 37-unit townhouse portfolio in Cuyahoga Falls across three buildings sold for $3.5 million, roughly $94,622 per unit, to Beatty Property Management of Canton, reported August 19. Country Club Manor at 3741 East Market Street in Warren sold September 2 for $2.75 million; county records report the unit count only as a range of 20 to 39, so a reliable per-unit figure is not available and should not be published as one.

One distress data point worth keeping

In May, Commercial Real Estate Direct reported that a 738-unit suburban Cleveland apartment property backing a two-year-old $53 million CMBS loan saw its appraised value fall 84 percent. Strong market-level occupancy does not immunize an individual over-levered asset, and it does not immunize a 2023-vintage underwriting assumption. When you are reconciling a value-add multifamily assignment, that outcome is inside the range of possibilities, not outside it.

What runs through all three sectors

Construction cost is the quiet variable. Cushman & Wakefield’s spring national construction report shows switchgear costs up more than 17 percent over two years and nonferrous metals up nearly 37 percent year over year, with lumber flat to declining. The Midwest was the only U.S. region with declining commercial starts last quarter. If electrical gear is the binding constraint, cost-approach depreciation studies and feasibility analyses on any project with heavy power requirements need current pricing, not last year’s.

Public financing is now structural, not supplemental. Almost every project listed above carries abatement, TIF, historic tax credits, brownfield funds, LIHTC, or port bonds, and several carry four or five at once. Cleveland Metroparks disclosed losing $3 million in 2025 revenue to tax breaks against $98 million in total property tax revenue, with commercial abatements and TIFs making up 80 percent of the loss. Cleveland Metropolitan School District lost $41.5 million over the same period. Whether you treat incentives as an adjustment to the subject, a factor in comparable selection, or a going-concern issue, you have to treat them as something. Ignoring them is no longer defensible.

Capital has decided this is a yield market. Retail at an 8.8 percent average cap rate and multifamily at 8.01 percent are not appreciation bets. Buyers here are underwriting income durability, and the appraisal work follows: anchor credit analysis, lease term and rollover, expense stability, and realistic reversion. That is closer to bond analysis than to growth-market analysis, and reconciliation weighting should reflect it.

Reappraisal is about to become everyone’s problem. The 2026 cycle covers Ashland, Ashtabula, Summit, and Wayne counties on a sexennial reappraisal and Geauga, Harrison, Mahoning, Richland, and Trumbull on a triennial update. Average residential increases are running about 18 percent in Summit County and 30 percent in Ashtabula. Commercial-specific percentages have not been published, which is itself worth noting. Informal value disputes ran through August. Formal appeals to boards of revision open in January 2027. Tax appeal work is coming, and it will come in volume.

Watch list

September 15, 2026: stalking-horse bid deadline for 925 Euclid Avenue; court-monitored auction set for November 3.
September 25, 2026: Uptown Mentor groundbreaking.
September 30, 2026: Sleepy Hollow Market and Rico’s close in Brunswick Hills; Rise Dispensary proposal advances or does not.
Early October 2026: third-quarter broker reports publish. First clean read on whether industrial vacancy held below 4 percent.
Early November 2026: Shalersville Township’s data center moratorium expires. The township held off on the zoning changes that would allow the Bitdeer and Geis campus after a contentious August 12 regional planning meeting. The project as proposed is 257 acres, 15 buildings, 150 MW initially and up to 750 MW at full build-out, more than $300 million in construction cost, and an estimated $2.17 million in annual property tax revenue with no incentives requested.
January 2027: 2026 reappraisal values hit tax bills; board of revision appeals open.
Second half of 2027: GE Aerospace and CPP transaction expected to close, pending regulatory approval.

A closing note on method

Every figure in this post is attributed. That is not decoration. Three reputable brokerages currently publish Cleveland industrial vacancy rates that differ by 250 basis points, and two reputable sources publish Cleveland apartment rents that differ by more than $200 a month. Both sets of numbers are correct within their own definitions. Neither survives being blended with the other.

The discipline that matters in this market right now is not finding the number. It is naming which number you used and why.

Sources

Industrial

Retail

Multifamily

Policy, tax, and incentives

This post is general market commentary prepared by Rubber City Appraisal Studio, LLC. It is not an appraisal, an appraisal review, or an opinion of value on any specific property, and it should not be relied upon as one. Figures are reported as published by the cited sources on the dates shown. Market conditions change.