Kind: Measured report
By Asif Hussain, Founder and CEO, SpecIndex
Since January 2025, we have logged 6,625 warehouse, distribution center, and fulfillment center construction projects across 47 states in SpecIndex's own database of public bid and permit records, worth a combined $7 billion. Texas leads the count with 2,499 projects, and Florida leads on value with $2.6 billion, not the traditional big box logistics corridors: the Inland Empire, the I-80/I-81 corridor, or the Dallas Fort Worth submarkets trade press has covered for a decade. That order is a sign that the current build cycle is chasing population growth and port access as much as legacy freight infrastructure.
Facts at a glance
- Since January 2025, we have logged 6,625 warehouse, distribution center, and fulfillment center construction projects across 47 states in SpecIndex's own database of public bid and permit records, worth a combined $7 billion. (From: the opening paragraph.)
- Texas leads the count with 2,499 projects, and Florida leads on value with $2.6 billion, not the traditional big box logistics corridors: the Inland Empire, the I-80/I-81 corridor, or the Dallas Fort Worth submarkets trade press has covered for a decade. (From: the opening paragraph.)
- The population is the 6,625 projects logged as active since January 1, 2025, across 47 states, worth a combined $7 billion. (From: Method note.)
- The headline results were 1,361 returned positions for Owens Corning and 267 for Notifier. (From: Method note.)
Texas leads on count, and Florida leads on value
Count and value name different leaders, and the list below keeps the two apart. Texas carries the project count, Florida carries the dollars, and one small count state shows how a single tenant can move a state total.
Texas: 2,499 projects, $1.5 billion. The highest project count nationally, spread across a larger number of smaller facilities than Florida's total.
Florida: 2,191 projects, $2.6 billion. The largest warehouse and distribution pipeline in the country by value, tracking the state's continued population and port throughput growth.
Hawaii: 2 projects, $600 million, entirely attributable to a single large proposed Amazon fulfillment center in Kapolei, a reminder that even a small count state can carry an outsized dollar figure once a hyperscale logistics tenant commits.
Arizona: 222 projects, $564 million.
Illinois: 244 projects, $420 million.
New York: 364 projects, $196 million.
Oklahoma: 36 projects, $179 million.
Florida and Texas together account for 4,690 of the 6,625 projects and $4.1 billion of the $7 billion in this dataset, a concentration that maps more closely to population and consumer demand growth than to the traditional freight corridor logic that drove the last decade's industrial building boom.
Last mile economics pulled the pipeline toward population centers
The prior generation of speculative warehouse development clustered around a handful of national freight hubs, because e-commerce fulfillment networks were built outward from a small number of mega distribution nodes. The current pipeline looks different because last mile delivery economics now reward proximity to population centers over proximity to freight rail or interstate junctions.
A fulfillment center within a short drive of a metro area's rooftops beats a larger, cheaper facility two hours further out, once delivery window promises are factored into the site selection math. Florida's population growth and Texas's combination of population growth and available industrial land make both states direct beneficiaries of that shift, independent of either state's legacy freight infrastructure.
The specification money sits in the envelope and in life safety, not in finishes
Warehouse and distribution center specifications concentrate in a narrower band of divisions than hospital, school, or multifamily projects: building envelope, fire protection, and building automation and security systems for facilities running around the clock operations. Cited positions from the corpus show that concentration in the envelope and in life safety.
On "Amendment 02 Textile Warehouse Office Addition and Renovation," Division 07 (Thermal and Moisture Protection) names the basis of design product "Owens Corning's Thermafiber" (document "Drawings_Rev_02_Textile Warehouse_20260402.pdf", page 7 to 7). The envelope decision is the specification decision on a building of this type.
A second envelope position, on "SLBC 21-470420014 RENOVATION, WAREHOUSE & SIGNAL SHOP, PHARR DHQ," names in Division 07 the basis of design product "EcoTouch Thermal Batt Fiberglass Insulation (unfaced) by Owens Corning" (document "media.nl", pages 467 to 506).
Life safety carries named positions of its own. On "B346 - Warehouse Expansion," Division 28 (Electronic Safety and Security) names the basis of design product "Notifier NFS-320" (document "Attachment 1 B346 - Design Build SOW 2 Jun 23.pdf", page 14 to 14).
Read together, the three positions reflect where a modern distribution center's specification budget goes: toward the systems that keep a 24 hour operation secure and insurable, rather than toward finishes.
The window between announcement and bid is compressed, so the manual is the deadline
Warehouse projects move from announcement to bid faster than hospital or school projects. Spec industrial development breaks ground on a compressed timeline once land and entitlements clear, which means the window between a public announcement and a document naming real manufacturers is shorter here than in any other sector this dataset tracks. That compressed timeline makes it easier to miss the specification document entirely if a manufacturer is only watching press releases and permit filings rather than the project manual itself.
The practical consequence is a change in sequence. Treat the announcement as the trigger to find the bid package at once, not as the news itself.
Read the envelope, fire protection, and security sections as soon as the manual posts, and settle your named position, or your approved equal route, before the bid date. In this sector the compressed window leaves no second pass after the manual has been out and the bid clock has run.
Method note
We counted warehouse, distribution center, and fulfillment center projects in SpecIndex's own database of public bid and permit records. The population is the 6,625 projects logged as active since January 1, 2025, across 47 states, worth a combined $7 billion.
The match rule is the one the article describes: projects the corpus records as warehouse, distribution center, or fulfillment center projects in those public bid and permit records, with state totals taken from the same records. The window is January 1, 2025 onward.
The state figures, including Texas's 2,499 projects and $1.5 billion, Florida's 2,191 projects and $2.6 billion, and the $7 billion combined value, are retained from the original publication and are dated as of the article's original September 2026 count. The corpus keeps growing, so the figures are dated and later counts will differ. The combined Florida and Texas totals in the state section are the sums of those retained state figures.
The three exhibits in the specification section were measured on October 16, 2026, with find_brand_positions queries for Owens Corning and Notifier. The headline results were 1,361 returned positions for Owens Corning and 267 for Notifier. From those returns we chose rows on warehouse projects that carry a citation, and we quoted the specified_product field exactly as returned, with the project name, document_title, and page span exactly as returned.