Southern California’s twin ports posted blistering June cargo volumes as retailers and manufacturers pulled shipments forward to beat a wave of new U.S. tariffs and climbing fuel costs, sending fresh freight toward an Inland Empire warehouse market still working through a supply glut.
The Port of Los Angeles, the busiest container gateway in the United States, moved 1,002,734 twenty-foot equivalent units in June, up 12 percent from a year earlier and the strongest June in the port’s 118-year history, executive director Gene Seroka said on July 15. It was only the third month ever that the port has cleared the 1 million-container threshold. Loaded imports jumped 13 percent to 530,558 TEUs, loaded exports were essentially flat at 126,365, and empty containers—a signal of how fast boxes are being cycled back out for reloading—surged 17 percent to 345,811.
The rush is a defensive one. Importers are front-loading goods ahead of an expiring block of temporary 10 percent Section 122 tariffs and a second round of forced-labor-related duties expected to follow, part of the Trump administration’s pivot to a Section 301 trade strategy after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down its emergency tariffs in February. Marine fuel costs have also spiked amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, which has scrambled shipping lanes across the Middle East and pushed container rates higher.
“Many retailers are making strategic decisions and have stepped away from traditional seasonal shipping patterns, advancing cargo whenever they see an opening rather than waiting for perfect conditions,” Seroka said. He credited terminal operators, dockworkers, truckers and rail partners with clearing the volume without vessel backlogs or cargo delays.
Neighboring Long Beach told a similar story. The Port of Long Beach handled 779,331 TEUs in June, its third-busiest June on record, lifted by an 11 percent jump in imports, according to port figures released July 14. Chief Executive Officer Mario Cordero and his team have pointed to the same tariff-driven urgency gripping the trans-Pacific trade lane. Nationwide, U.S. container imports climbed 8.2 percent year-over-year in June, according to supply chain technology provider Descartes Systems Group.
For commercial real estate, the numbers cut two ways. The San Pedro Bay complex is the front door for roughly 40 percent of the nation’s containerized imports, and those boxes ultimately need warehouse space—most of it 60 miles east in the Inland Empire, the country’s largest industrial market. A sustained import run would, in ordinary times, tighten the region’s big-box vacancy and firm up rents.
But the surge is landing on a market still absorbing a wave of speculative construction. Inland Empire industrial vacancy in the market’s core rose to 7.8 percent in the first quarter of 2026, a 70-basis-point increase from the prior quarter, as several large tenants vacated buildings of 500,000 square feet and up, according to CBRE’s Q1 2026 Inland Empire industrial figures. Even so, leasing momentum returned: tenants signed 13.6 million square feet of new deals in the quarter, a 40.2 percent jump from the 9.7 million square feet leased in the fourth quarter of 2025, per the same report. Average asking rents held at $1.09 per square foot on a triple-net basis, and 854,000 square feet of new development broke ground after a quarter with no starts at all.
The question hanging over landlords is whether June’s cargo bump translates into leases that stick. Analysts caution that much of the current volume is borrowed from the future. Ben Hackett, founder of maritime consultancy Hackett Associates, has attributed the increase largely to front-loading ahead of expected tariff hikes, with volumes projected to stay elevated through July before tapering once the deadlines pass. The National Retail Federation has flagged the same combination of tariff uncertainty and Iran-related disruption as a reason importers are moving early rather than betting on calmer conditions later in the year.
That leaves developers and owners across the Los Angeles Basin and Inland Empire reading the tea leaves. A durable shift would reward the operators who kept building through the downturn; a front-loaded head-fake would leave newly delivered big-box space chasing tenants into a softer fall. Seroka framed the moment as an “unusually dynamic trade environment,” and for the warehouse market that feeds off these docks, the next two quarters will show whether record cargo becomes signed leases or simply pulls demand out of the back half of 2026.
