A softening market has pushed the U.S. industrial vacancy rate to 8.2 percent, its highest level in three years, according to Grubb & Ellis Co.’s second-quarter industrial market trend report.

Des Moines’ industrial vacancy rate is 4.2 percent, compared with 1.9 percent in Los Angeles and 16.1 percent in Raleigh-Durham, N.C., according the report, which says new speculative warehouse/distribution facilities have helped the city in a tight market.

Morey Knutsen, a senior vice president at Grubb & Ellis/Mid-America Commercial, said one reason Des Moines is faring well compared with the national figures is the metro area’s conservative development community, which tends not to overbuild.

“We are backfilling existing space and beginning to fill up new space that has been recently completed or is under construction,” Knutsen said.

Developers are responding to the low vacancy rate with new construction, Knutsen said, citing Hubbell Realty Co.’s 110,000-square-foot distribution center on Iowa Highway 141 in Grimes and R&R Realty Group’s 150,000-square-foot Meredith V warehouse in Urbandale, which are both slated to be completed by the end of the year. Hubbell has tentative plans to build four warehouses in Grimes Business Park, though there is currently no timetable in place to begin construction.

Meredith IV, a 120,000-square-foot warehouse just south of the Meredith V building, was completed in January and is 75 percent occupied.

Another property, the CSC building at 4200 N.W. Urbandale Drive in Urbandale, will open an additional 153,000 square feet of space when the current tenant vacates the premises in June 2009, said Knutsen, who is the listing agent on the property.

“We’re just ahead of the demand curve,” Knutsen said, referring to the high-cube warehouse space – contiguous 50,000-square-foot spaces with clearance heights of 24 feet or more – which is in short supply in Des Moines according to the Grubb & Ellis report.

Staying ahead of the curve, however, could be difficult without more construction, Knutsen said. He noted that if a 400,000- or 500,000-square-foot user were to arrive in Des Moines, “we can’t take care of them, and they will have to go outside the metro” to find the space.

Knutsen anticipates that all of the 403,000 square feet of high-cube industrial space that is currently available or under construction, will be filled within eight to 12 months.