Capital Region Industrial Real Estate: A 2025 Market Report

In 2025, 103 industrial commercial sales of $100,000 or greater were recorded at the Clerk of Court’s office across East Baton Rouge and Ascension Parishes. ELIFIN brokered 40 of them.

That works out to roughly 2 of every 5 industrial transactions in the Capital Region. It is likely the highest single-firm share of any property type in either parish for the year.

This is a look at the year that produced those numbers, the team that produced them, and what the activity says about the region’s industrial market.

A market measured by 103 transactions

Industrial real estate in the Capital Region held steady in 2025. Eighty-two industrial properties traded in East Baton Rouge Parish at $100,000 or more. Twenty-one traded in Ascension. The mix ranged from small flex buildings on Choctaw Drive to single-tenant manufacturing facilities along the Mississippi River corridor.

Demand drivers were familiar. Petrochemical operators along the river continued to expand ancillary footprints. Logistics users took advantage of the region’s I-10 and I-12 positioning. Owner-users in trades, fabrication, and equipment storage drove a steady undercurrent of smaller transactions in the $200,000 to $750,000 range, which made up most of the 2025 deal count by number of closings. And investor demand was a substantial part of the year, with capital coming from both local buyers and out-of-state investors based in Dallas, Houston, and California.

What the data did not show was a slowdown. The Capital Region’s industrial market has held this band of activity for several consecutive years, and 2025 continued the pattern. This is a working market that produces consistent transaction flow regardless of what the national headlines are doing.

Where the deals went

ELIFIN brokered 32 of the 82 industrial sales recorded in East Baton Rouge Parish in 2025. That is 39 percent of the parish total. In Ascension, the firm brokered 8 of 21, or 38 percent.

Combined across the two parishes, 40 of 103 industrial sales had ELIFIN on at least one side of the deal. The share holds at 39 percent regardless of how the geography is divided, which is unusual. It suggests the practice is broadly distributed across the industrial inventory in both parishes rather than concentrated in one corridor or product type.

The agents driving industrial sales in South Louisiana

ELIFIN’s industrial team works markets across South Louisiana. The broker on the largest share of the Capital Region’s 2025 transactions is Alex Ruch.

Of the 103 industrial transactions recorded at the Clerk of Court in 2025, Alex personally brokered 34. He brokered 30 of the 82 East Baton Rouge industrial sales recorded that year, or roughly 37 percent of every industrial transaction in the parish. He brokered another 4 in Ascension. Combined, that is approximately 1 of every 3 industrial sales in the Capital Region.

Alex anchors a broader ELIFIN industrial practice. Cade McNabb, whose block specialty is industrial in Ascension Parish (Geismar, Gonzales, Donaldsonville, Prairieville, Sorrento), had a standout year that included brokering the largest single deal in ELIFIN’s history at the time of closing. He is one of the fastest-growing brokers in the firm. ELIFIN’s industrial coverage extends west to Lafayette, where Mark Johns leads the practice, east to New Orleans with Adrien Foley, and south to Terrebonne Parish, where Caden LeBlanc is the firm’s Houma-area industrial specialist. A Baton Rouge seller’s property gets pitched to investors in New Orleans and Lafayette through the same firm. A New Orleans buyer sees Capital Region inventory through the same firm. The full ELIFIN team is on the firm’s website.

What it takes to sell industrial property in the Capital Region

For owners thinking about selling, specialist representation is what makes the difference between asset value and what actually closes. A broker who handles a handful of industrial transactions a year cannot match the buyer relationships, market intelligence, and recent comp memory of a team that closes over a hundred.

For buyers, the same logic runs in reverse. Some of the strongest industrial opportunities in the Capital Region in 2025 never showed up as marketed offerings. They went directly to buyers the team already knew were active.

How we know

The numbers in this article are built from a proprietary review of every commercial sale recorded at the Clerk of Court’s office in East Baton Rouge, Ascension, Orleans, Jefferson, and Lafayette Parishes. Every week, an ELIFIN team member pulls the recordings, reviews them, and adds the qualifying transactions to the firm’s market database.

This matters because voluntary commercial real estate listing databases rely on member brokerages to self-report their closings. Coverage varies. Some transactions never enter those databases. Some get reported with incomplete information. The Clerk of Court record, by contrast, is the legal record of every sale that closed.

The dataset ELIFIN works from is the universe, not a sample. The 39 percent figure, the 1-in-3 figure, and every other number here can be verified at the source.

Looking at 2026

The Capital Region’s industrial market entered 2026 in the same posture it held through most of 2025: steady, broad-based, and driven by a mix of owner-user, operator, and investor demand. Early-year activity suggests the volume will hold.

For industrial property owners considering a sale this year, the questions worth asking any prospective broker are straightforward. How many industrial transactions did they close last year? Do they know the recent industrial buyers active in your submarket? Can they tell you what comparable buildings traded for in the last twelve months without looking it up?

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