What Is Industrial Outdoor Storage (IOS)? A 2026 Guide for Inland Empire Owners

What Is Industrial Outdoor Storage (IOS)?

You have driven past industrial outdoor storage a thousand times without registering it: the gravel lot full of trailers behind a screened fence, the equipment yard beside the freeway, the drayage lot stacked with empty containers. For decades these were afterthought parcels. In 2026 they are one of the most closely watched niches in commercial real estate — and the Inland Empire, with its port-fed truck volumes and increasingly restrictive land policy, sits at the center of the story. This guide covers the definition, the institutional capital now chasing the asset class, the IE-specific supply squeeze, what physically and legally qualifies a site, how IOS is priced, and what it all means if you own — or want to lease — a yard. For the one-line version, see the IOS entry in our A-Z CRE glossary.

Start with what makes IOS structurally different. A warehouse investment is a bet on a building: its clear height, dock doors, sprinklers, and office finish. An industrial outdoor storage investment is a bet on entitled land — a parcel that is zoned, permitted, surfaced, fenced, and located so that trucks, trailers, containers, equipment, or materials can legally sit on it. The improvements are deliberately minimal, which means less to maintain, less to depreciate, and less that can go functionally obsolete. What the tenant is really paying for is scarce permission: the right to park and stage outdoors in a region that issues that right less and less often.

Common IOS users include drayage and trucking companies parking tractors and trailers, fleet operators staging vehicles, third-party logistics firms with more trailers than dock doors, equipment-rental and utility contractors storing machinery, and building-materials suppliers running laydown yards. One asset class, many demand streams — which is part of why vacancy in the niche runs so low.

Why Institutional Capital Moved Into Industrial Outdoor Storage

Ten years ago, yards were overwhelmingly a mom-and-pop business. That has changed. Newmark estimates the readily tradable universe of IOS real estate at roughly $200 billion — a figure cited by investment firm Sagard in an August 2026 analysis of the sector’s move, in its words, toward the institutional inner circle. Bisnow has reported the same $200 billion figure as the conservative case, noting the market could exceed $1 trillion if rarely traded rail yards, inland intermodal terminals, and port-related land were included.

The fundamentals pulled that capital in. Per CBRE data for Q4 2025, as reported by Commercial Property Executive in March 2026, IOS net rents averaged $13.14 per square foot at year-end 2025 versus $10.85 for standard industrial — a 17.9% national rent premium — while IOS vacancy sat at just 2.5% against 6.7% for traditional industrial. Commercial Property Executive described IOS as “one of the most constrained, and most competitive, asset classes” in industrial real estate. The premium is strongest exactly where land is hardest to entitle: CBRE’s data shows the West region carrying a roughly 25% IOS rent premium over traditional industrial, with Sacramento (+52.8%) and Oakland (+49%) among the metro leaders, per Sagard’s review of the figures.

Rent growth tells the same story, though trackers measure it differently — so attribute, never blend. Sagard’s synthesis of Newmark and CBRE data puts national IOS rent growth at roughly 130% over five years; Marcus & Millichap has separately reported national IOS rents up about 30% since the end of 2019. Either way, the direction is unambiguous.

And the buyers now have names. Per Sagard, citing PERE and company data: Zenith IOS’s venture with JPMorgan has grown past $1.5 billion in gross asset value; Alterra IOS holds roughly 500 properties across 39 states with more than $2 billion in cumulative borrowings; and Blackstone has committed $469 million in debt to Alterra’s IOS Venture III since 2025. Historically, Clarion Partners and CBRE note, IOS has traded at a 50-100 basis point cap-rate premium over traditional warehouse — a yield cushion that institutional buyers read as opportunity as the asset class matures.

Metric	Industrial outdoor storage (IOS)	Traditional industrial
Income driver	The yard (entitled land)	The building
Net rent, year-end 2025 — CBRE	$13.14/SF	$10.85/SF
Vacancy, Q4 2025 — CBRE	2.5%	6.7%
Pricing convention	Per acre (or per SF of land) per month	Per SF of building per month
Historical cap-rate spread — Clarion/CBRE	~50-100 bps premium (higher yield)	Baseline

Why the Inland Empire Is Built for IOS Demand — and Starved for IOS Supply

The Inland Empire is the inland port of the busiest container complex in the Western Hemisphere, and every container that leaves San Pedro Bay rides a chassis behind a tractor that has to park, stage, and swap somewhere. The volumes keep growing: the Port of Long Beach posted its busiest year ever in 2025 at 9.9 million TEU, and the combined San Pedro Bay ports expect 18.5-19 million TEU in 2026, per Semafor and CNBC reporting logged in Apex’s CRE Signal Radar market intelligence. That freight physically becomes truck trips through Riverside and San Bernardino counties — which is exactly the drayage, fleet, and trailer-pool demand that fills Inland Empire industrial yards.

A structural truck-parking shortage

Demand for yard space starts with a national arithmetic problem: the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) estimates there is just one truck parking space for every 11 truck drivers, and a Federal Highway Administration survey of roughly 11,700 drivers found 98% report problems finding safe parking. Parking ranked No. 2 overall in ATRI’s 2023 Critical Issues in the Trucking Industry survey — and No. 1 among drivers themselves. In a freight market as dense as the IE, that shortage translates directly into paid demand for secured, legal places to put trucks and trailers.

Supply is now constrained by law: AB 98 and local moratoriums

On the supply side, California has made new logistics land harder to create. AB 98 took effect January 1, 2026 for new or expanded logistics-use developments, per client alerts from Holland & Knight and O’Melveny. Its headline provisions:

AB 98 requirement	What it says	Timing
Loading-bay setbacks	Truck loading bays must sit at least 300 ft from sensitive receptors in industrial areas and at least 500 ft in non-industrial areas (500 ft applies in the warehouse concentration subregion)	Effective Jan 1, 2026 for new/expanded logistics developments
Design and buffer standards	Design, landscaping buffer, parking, and signage standards for covered logistics facilities	Effective Jan 1, 2026
Designated truck routes	Every city and county must establish and publicly designate truck routes to and from logistics facilities; facility operators must submit truck routing plans	By Jan 1, 2028 (Jan 1, 2026 in the warehouse concentration region)

Local policy layers on top of the state rules, and it cuts city by city. Rialto declared a moratorium on new warehouse approvals, per the San Bernardino County Sentinel as logged in Apex’s CRE Signal Radar. Moreno Valley went the other way — its City Council rejected a proposed warehouse moratorium in a 3-2 vote on February 3, 2026, per the Riverside Record. The takeaway for yard owners and users is not that the IE is closed for business; it is that entitlement outcomes are now decided parcel by parcel, and land that already carries the right zoning and permits is scarcer than the map suggests.

The construction pipeline fell off a cliff

The result shows up in the development data. Bisnow reported the Inland Empire industrial construction pipeline at its lowest level since 2013 — roughly 11.6 million SF underway — citing regulatory headwinds including AB 98 and local moratoriums. JLL’s Q1 2026 count was tighter still: just 6.9 million SF under construction, about 1% of total stock versus a 1.7% national average, with completions down 41% year over year. When new industrial land is this hard to entitle, existing yards do not get easier to replace — and building-based rents tell only part of the market’s story (for that side, see our Inland Empire warehouse rent guide).

What Qualifies a Site as Industrial Outdoor Storage?

Not every vacant lot is an IOS property. A yard earns institutional-grade rent because it clears a specific physical and legal checklist. The physical items are fairly consistent across markets; the legal items are decided by whichever city or county controls the parcel.

• Zoning and entitlements. Outdoor storage and truck yards are generally confined to light or heavy industrial zones (M-1/M-2-type designations), and many jurisdictions additionally require a conditional use permit (CUP) or minor use permit. Several Inland Empire cities prohibit new truck or trailer storage outright, and city versus county jurisdiction can change the answer across the street — always verify the specific parcel with the planning department.
• Surfacing. Requirements vary enormously by jurisdiction — dust-proofed gravel or crushed rock is acceptable in some, while others require full asphalt paving on storage areas and drive aisles. Surfacing is often the single biggest capital-cost variable in converting raw land to a compliant yard.
• Fencing and screening. Perimeter fencing with privacy screening is standard — and frequently code-required — both for security and to shield stored equipment from public view.
• Grading and drainage. A usable yard is graded, compacted, and drains properly; a lot that ponds after rain loses usable capacity exactly when tenants need it.
• Truck circulation. Drive aisles and gates must be sized for tractor-trailer turning movements; drive-around capability is a meaningful premium feature for fleet users.
• Power and lighting. Yard lighting and security infrastructure are baseline; power for reefer (refrigerated trailer) plugs or an office trailer expands the tenant pool.
• Freeway access. Proximity to freeway on-ramps — and, under AB 98, to designated truck routes — determines how much dead-head time a fleet burns getting in and out.

A useful mental model: the closer a parcel already is to “fenced, surfaced, powered, and permitted,” the closer its rent gets to true IOS pricing rather than raw-land pricing. You can browse current yard and land availability on our Inland Empire land hub.

How Industrial Outdoor Storage Is Priced: Per Acre, Not Per Building Foot

Warehouse rent is quoted per square foot of building per month. IOS flips the unit of account: because the building is small or absent, yards are quoted per acre per month or per square foot of land per month, usually on a net or ground-lease structure where the tenant also carries taxes, insurance, and maintenance in some combination (our triple net lease guide explains how net structures allocate those costs).

A live Inland Empire example makes the convention concrete. Per the Apex listing at 13650 Calimesa Blvd in Yucaipa, a ±2.18-acre (±94,961 SF) fully fenced and privacy-screened graded yard with Interstate 10 visibility is asking $0.12 per square foot of land per month on a ground-lease basis. Run the arithmetic on that published rate and the per-acre convention appears: $0.12 × 43,560 SF per acre ≈ $5,227 per acre per month. That calculation is simple math on the listing’s published rate — illustrative, not a quote, and other yards will price differently.

Be skeptical of blanket “per-acre” benchmarks for the Inland Empire: no major published source we rely on prints an IE-specific IOS rent index, so honest pricing conversations work from national data (CBRE’s $13.14/SF year-end 2025 net-rent average and the roughly 25% West premium, as reported by Commercial Property Executive and Sagard) plus live local comparables. What moves an individual yard’s rate is concrete: entitlement status, surfacing quality, power, fencing and screening, freeway access, parcel shape and truck circulation, and lease term. Two-acre differences in usability can matter more than two-mile differences in location.

One more distinction worth naming: on a ground lease, the tenant leases the land itself and typically supplies its own minimal improvements — which is why yard deals can move faster than building leases, with less negotiation over tenant improvements and more over term, rate escalations, and permitted use. If you are new to the leasing process end to end, start with our guide on how to lease commercial property.

Buy, Hold, or Lease: The 2026 Questions for Inland Empire Yard Owners

If you own low-coverage industrial land in Riverside or San Bernardino County — a fenced lot, a contractor yard, a parcel with a small shop building and a big apron — 2026 presents three broad paths, each with trade-offs worth underwriting honestly.

Hold and lease the yard. Leasing to a trucking, contractor, or equipment user converts idle land into income while you retain the long-term appreciation and the optionality of the entitlement itself. Yard leases are typically net or ground-lease structures, so the operating burden on the owner can be light. The demand drivers covered above — port volumes, the truck-parking shortage, constrained new supply — are the tailwind; tenant credit, permitted-use compliance, and property upkeep remain squarely on your diligence list.

Sell into the institutional bid. A seller pool that was once local owner-users now includes national aggregators — the Zenith/JPMorgan and Alterra/Blackstone ventures cited earlier are buying exactly this profile of asset. Price expectations should stay grounded: IOS has historically traded at a 50-100 basis point cap-rate premium to warehouse per Clarion Partners and CBRE, which cuts both ways — higher yield for buyers means a valuation discipline for sellers. A broker opinion of value built on real comparables, not headlines, is the right starting point.

Entitle or upgrade before you transact. Because AB 98 and local moratoriums make new logistics entitlements harder to create, the entitlement work itself — confirming zoning, securing or documenting a CUP, bringing surfacing and screening up to code — can be where the value is added. It is also parcel-specific and timeline-uncertain: policy differs by city, can change, and nothing here is a promise of approval or of investment performance. Treat every step as a verification exercise with the planning department and your own advisors.

Whichever path fits, the common denominator is information: what your parcel is actually entitled to do, what comparable yards are actually achieving, and who is actually in the market. That is brokerage work, and it is what we do all day at Apex across the Inland Empire land market.

Featured: A Live IOS Yard on Interstate 10

Industrial Outdoor Storage FAQ

What does IOS stand for in real estate?

IOS stands for industrial outdoor storage — low-coverage industrial land used to store trucks, trailers, containers, equipment, and materials outdoors rather than inside a building. The yard, not the structure, produces the income. Sites are typically fenced, screened, and graded, and rents are quoted per acre or per square foot of land per month.

What is the difference between an IOS property and a truck yard?

A truck yard is one type of industrial outdoor storage. IOS is the umbrella asset class covering truck and trailer parking, fleet and drayage staging, container storage, contractor laydown yards, and equipment or materials storage. Every truck yard is IOS, but an IOS site may serve users that have nothing to do with trucking, such as equipment-rental companies, utility contractors, or building-materials suppliers.

Is industrial outdoor storage a good investment?

It can be attractive, but outcomes are site-specific. Institutional investors have entered the sector — CBRE’s Q4 2025 data showed IOS with higher net rents ($13.14 versus $10.85 per square foot) and lower vacancy (2.5% versus 6.7%) than traditional industrial, and Clarion Partners and CBRE note IOS has historically traded at a 50-100 basis point cap-rate premium. Results still hinge on zoning, entitlements, surfacing, location, tenant demand, and purchase basis, and past performance does not guarantee future results. This is general market information, not investment advice — underwrite any specific yard with your own advisors.

How much does it cost to lease an industrial outdoor storage yard in the Inland Empire?

No approved source publishes an Inland Empire-specific IOS rent benchmark, so treat blanket per-acre numbers with caution. Nationally, CBRE’s Q4 2025 data put IOS net rents at $13.14 per square foot with a roughly 25% West-region premium over traditional industrial. As one live local data point, Apex’s ±2.18-acre yard at 13650 Calimesa Blvd in Yucaipa asks $0.12 per square foot of land per month on a ground lease — about $5,227 per acre per month by simple arithmetic on the published rate. Actual rates vary with surfacing, power, access, entitlements, and term.

What zoning do you need for outdoor storage or a truck yard in California?

Generally a light or heavy industrial zone (M-1/M-2-type designations), and many jurisdictions also require a conditional use permit or minor use permit for outdoor storage or trailer parking. Rules differ dramatically city by city in the Inland Empire — several cities prohibit new truck or trailer storage outright, and surfacing and screening standards vary by jurisdiction — so always verify a specific parcel with the city or county planning department before you buy or lease.

How does California’s AB 98 affect IOS and truck yards?

AB 98 took effect January 1, 2026 for new or expanded logistics-use developments in California. Per Holland & Knight and O’Melveny client alerts, it requires truck loading bays to sit at least 300 feet from sensitive receptors in industrial areas (500 feet in non-industrial areas), imposes design, buffer, parking, and signage standards, and requires every city and county to designate truck routes by January 1, 2028 (January 1, 2026 in the warehouse concentration region), with operators submitting routing plans. By restricting new logistics development, AB 98 tends to make existing entitled yards and industrial land scarcer — and therefore more strategically valuable.

Why is there a truck parking shortage in the United States?

Because parking supply never kept pace with freight growth. The American Transportation Research Institute estimates one truck parking space exists for every 11 truck drivers nationally, and a Federal Highway Administration survey of roughly 11,700 drivers found 98% report problems finding safe parking. Parking ranked No. 2 overall — and No. 1 among drivers — in ATRI’s 2023 Critical Issues in the Trucking Industry survey. That structural shortage is a core demand driver for industrial outdoor storage yards along freight corridors like the Inland Empire’s I-10, I-15, and I-215.

Sources: Newmark IOS market-size estimate and Clarion Partners/CBRE cap-rate history, as cited by Sagard, “Industrial outdoor storage moves toward the institutional inner circle” (August 10, 2026); Bisnow, “The $200B Opportunity Of Industrial Outdoor Storage”; CBRE Q4 2025 IOS rent and vacancy data, as reported by Commercial Property Executive (March 17, 2026); Marcus & Millichap IOS rent research (as summarized in secondary industry sources); Holland & Knight and O’Melveny AB 98 client alerts and California bill text; San Bernardino County Sentinel (Rialto moratorium) and Riverside Record (Moreno Valley vote), as logged in Apex CRE Signal Radar market intelligence (Q1 2026); Bisnow and JLL Q1 2026 Inland Empire industrial pipeline reporting; American Transportation Research Institute and Federal Highway Administration truck-parking research; Semafor and CNBC Port of Long Beach reporting; and the live Apex listing at 13650 Calimesa Blvd, Yucaipa. Every figure is attributed to its publisher and period in-text; publisher methodologies differ and are never averaged. Listing terms are subject to change and nothing here is a quote, an offer, or investment, legal, or tax advice.

Robert Mendieta Jr., CCIM · Associate Broker · DRE #01422904 · Apex Real Estate Services · 3750 E. Florida Ave Suite A, Hemet, CA 92544 · (951) 977-3251 · Joseph Lombera, Commercial Agent + CMO, DRE #01971957. Reviewed by Robert Mendieta Jr., CCIM (DRE #01422904). Last updated: August 19, 2026.