Palm Beach County Industrial: the one clean trend

Six years, six increases. Palm Beach County industrial is the only line in my entire South Florida dataset that goes up every single year without a stumble, and I want to start there because it is the one place where the annual median is actually telling you something.

2021 to 2026, no down years

Median price per square foot on recorded arm's-length industrial transfers, by year of sale: $168 in 2021 off 84 sales, $204 in 2022 off 82, $236 in 2023 off 59, $242 in 2024 off 71, $260 in 2025 off 88, and $290 so far in 2026 off 27. From 2021 through the completed 2025 year that is a 54.8 percent move.

Compare that to what the other two asset classes did over the same period. County office went $304, $328, $424, $318, $347, $438, bouncing more than a hundred dollars in both directions. County retail went $359, $327, $412, $503, $391, $389. Those are mix reports. Industrial is a trend.

The reason is worth understanding, because it is the same reason the other two are noisy. Industrial has the narrowest price dispersion of the three assets in this county. The 25th percentile is $168 and the 75th is $303, a 1.80x interquartile spread against 2.32x in office and 3.18x in retail. When the underlying properties are more alike, a median made of seventy or eighty of them holds still, and a year-over-year change means what it appears to mean. Standard caution on 2026: 27 sales is a partial year and I would not extend that line yet.

Palm Beach industrial trades in bigger boxes than its neighbors

The county median across 411 industrial sales in 22 cities is $226 per square foot. Broward medians $212 off 690 sales and Miami-Dade $264 off 1,019. Read those three side by side and Palm Beach looks like the middle child.

Now look at what actually traded. The median Palm Beach industrial building in my dataset is 10,000 SF. In Broward it is 5,066 SF. In Miami-Dade, 5,056 SF. Palm Beach industrial sales are running at roughly twice the building size of both counties to the south, and the median deal is $2,300,000 against $1,110,000 in Broward and $1,465,000 in Miami-Dade. The median build year here is 1984.

That size difference is not a footnote. It changes what a cross-county comparison means. Palm Beach industrial does not sit $38 per foot below Miami-Dade because the buildings are worse. It sits there in part because the county's industrial sales are concentrated in larger boxes, and larger boxes price lower per foot everywhere.

The gradient, gentler here than anywhere else

Sorted by building size, the 411 sales read:

• Under 2,500 SF: $310 per foot, 54 sales
• 2,500 to 10,000 SF: $255, 151 sales
• 10,000 to 25,000 SF: $207, 108 sales
• 25,000 to 50,000 SF: $176, 46 sales
• 50,000 SF and up: $174 per foot, 52 sales

Smallest to largest is 1.78x. That is the tightest size gradient of the three asset classes here, well under office at 2.31x and retail at 2.12x, and it steps down cleanly at every band with no inversions. It is also still a 78 percent difference, which is more than enough to wreck a valuation.

Here is the part that matters most for this county specifically. Because the median Palm Beach industrial building is 10,000 SF, it sits right at the boundary between the $255 band and the $207 band. Two otherwise identical properties on either side of that line, priced off the $226 county median, will be wrong in opposite directions. That is the version of the mistake I see most in industrial: the number is not crazy, so nobody questions it, and it is quietly off by 20 percent.

Nine cities inside eighty-seven dollars

The industrial city ladder is the flattest thing in my dataset. Boca Raton tops it at $272 per foot off 29 sales, then Delray Beach $267 off 25, Jupiter $242 off 54, Boynton Beach $235 off 45, West Palm Beach $231 off 107, Lake Park $227 off 20, Riviera Beach $208 off 40, Lake Worth $201 off 37, and Mangonia Park $185 off 13.

Top to bottom is 1.47x. In retail, the same county ladder spans 8.7x. Industrial buyers are buying a box, a clear height, a loading configuration and a drive time, and those things do not vary by city the way a retail trade area does. West Palm Beach at $231 off 107 sales is the deepest single sample and lands almost exactly on the county median, which is what you would expect in a market this uniform.

The practical consequence: in industrial, city is a weak predictor and size is a strong one. That is the reverse of retail, where geography does most of the work. If you are pricing an industrial building here and someone leads with the submarket instead of the square footage, they have the two variables backwards.

Three things I check before I quote a per-foot number

1. The size band, first. Not the county median, not the city median. A 1.78x gradient across the range means the band choice moves the answer more than anything else on the page.
2. The sale count behind every median in the comp set. Mangonia Park's $185 rests on 13 transfers. Boca's $272 rests on 29. Neither is wrong, and neither carries the weight of West Palm Beach's 107.
3. Whether the trend applies to that band. The 2021 to 2025 run from $168 to $260 is a county-wide number. I do not assume it landed evenly across a 1,900 SF flex unit and a 60,000 SF warehouse.

The labor question nobody asks until the lease is signed

Industrial tenants need people who can get to the building. BLS put the West Palm Beach-Boca Raton-Delray Beach Metropolitan Division at 697,300 payroll jobs in July 2026, preliminary and not seasonally adjusted, up 3,700 or 0.5 percent over July 2025 against 0.3 percent nationally. Unemployment ran 4.8 percent, up from 4.1 percent the year before and above the 4.4 percent national rate. QCEW covered employment, the administrative count the payroll survey gets benchmarked to, was down 2,832 in March 2026 against March 2025, which is a reason to hold the job gain loosely.

Labor cost is going the other way, fast. The average weekly wage was $1,784 in Q1 2026 per the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, up 7.1 percent year over year against 3.9 percent nationally. That is the fastest wage growth of the three South Florida counties and nearly double the national pace. Median household income was $84,789 in the Census Bureau's 2024 ACS one-year estimate, above the $81,604 national figure.

And the workforce is not deepening. Census estimates have the county up 1,578 people, one tenth of one percent, between July 2024 and July 2025. It is the only one of the three South Florida counties that grew at all, and it only grew because 14,302 international arrivals covered 11,953 net domestic departures. A tenant underwriting a ten-year lease on staffing growth should look hard at that arithmetic.

Where to take this

If you are sizing a requirement, start with the actual square footage you need before anyone quotes you a rate, and the space calculator is the fastest way to get there. Representation on the tenant side is industrial tenant rep. If you own a building and the six-year run has you thinking about timing, that conversation starts with a band-matched valuation before it starts with a listing, and I handle both under selling commercial property. The office and retail reads for the same county are in my Palm Beach County market report.