1 Billion m³ in Mexico: Industrial Buildings Have More Space Than They Measure

In the industrial market, more space doesn't always mean more square meters. It can also mean more height.

Take, for example, two 20,000-square-meter industrial buildings. Although they occupy the same floor area, one can contain much more space than the other. If the first is eight meters high, it contains about 160,000 cubic meters. And if the second reaches 12 meters, it contains 240,000. In other words, one has 50% more volume than the other without adding a single square meter.

However, the industrial real estate market is typically sized by floor area, not volume.

In Mexico, SiiLA reports a total of 108 million square meters of industrial gross leasable area (GLA) in the main Class A and B markets across the northern, central and Bajío regions. Based on the available height data, the floor-area-weighted average reaches 9.6 meters. This means that each square meter of GLA represents an average of 9.6 cubic meters of interior space.

If that average height were applied to the entire monitored inventory, the 107.7 million square meters would represent more than 1 billion cubic meters. And that volume can serve different functions depending on the property’s use. In logistics, it allows vertical space to be used to store goods; in manufacturing, it can accommodate equipment, cranes and installations associated with production processes; and in data centers, the vertical dimension can be used to distribute infrastructure and manage the airflow needed to cool equipment¹.

Measuring the volume of the industrial market not only helps quantify the space inside industrial buildings, but also shows how the market is physically growing.

Among the buildings constructed between 2023 and 2025, however, growth did not occur upward. The floor-area-weighted average height fell from 10.1 meters in 2023 to 9.9 meters in 2024 and 9.8 meters in 2025². This means that, at least during those three years, new construction did not gain volume through increasingly taller buildings, but through the addition of floor space.

This can be seen more clearly between 2024 and 2025, when newly constructed floor space increased. During that period, the floor area of the new buildings analyzed grew 35.1%, while their floor-area-weighted average height decreased 1.6%. As a result, the volume added grew 33%, from 25.9 million to 34.5 million cubic meters. But that result can be broken down further to determine how much of the growth came from each dimension. According to SiiLA REsource calculations, a mathematical decomposition of the change shows that the increase in floor area accounted for 105.5% of the net volume growth, while the decrease in height subtracted 5.5%³. This does not mean that volume grew by more than itself, but rather that the increase would have been even greater had height remained unchanged.

The stability of recent building heights can be explained, in part, by new construction becoming standardized around certain levels, according to Carla González, SiiLA’s Head of Research. The change would be more evident when looking back several decades. “Many industrial buildings constructed during the 1990s and early 2000s had lower heights than those built today. Several factors converged behind that transformation, from advances in construction technology to the growth of logistics and e-commerce and the requirements of certain manufacturing processes”⁴, González said.

Square meters, therefore, still describe much of the industrial market’s recent growth, but they do not by themselves describe all the space the market contains. Two markets with the same GLA can contain different amounts of interior space, and the same floor area can gain volume without expanding horizontally. This means that a market could add space without that growth appearing as a single additional square meter of inventory, because an industrial building is leased and recorded by its floor area even though its usable space continues several meters above the floor.

Today, the industrial market is measured in two dimensions, even though it physically exists in three. Learn more about industrial properties on SiiLA SPOT or contact us at contacto@siila.com.mx.

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¹ U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, “Infrastructure Standard for Telecommunications Spaces,” Version 4.0, 2023; U.S. Department of Energy, Federal Energy Management Program, “Best Practices Guide for Energy-Efficient Data Center Design,” revised March 2011.

² The calculation includes buildings delivered in each year for which SiiLA has both GLA and height data: 172 properties in 2023, 149 in 2024 and 205 in 2025. Each property’s GLA weighted the average height for each year.

³ The contribution of each dimension was calculated using an exact decomposition of the change in volume (V = GLA × height), distributing the interaction term between the two variables. Between 2024 and 2025, the effect of the increase in floor area was approximately 9.04 million m³, while the effect of the decrease in height was −0.48 million, resulting in a net increase of 8.56 million m³. The percentages represent each component’s share of that net change.

⁴ Other factors associated with the evolution of industrial building heights include site characteristics and constraints; the evolution of storage and racking systems; material-handling equipment and automated systems; fire-protection requirements; and the evolution of industrial building specifications. See CBRE, “Industrial Clear Height”; EUA, “Finding the Best Clear Height for Your Industrial Project”; and Link Logistics, “What Is Clear Height? A Guide to Warehouse Ceilings and Vertical Space.”