A companion page on this site treats vacancy at purchase as a general discipline: vacancy is a project, price it like one. The industrial version of that project has its own physics, different enough to deserve its own page, because a vacant bay in a small park is simultaneously more concentrated, more specific, and more curable than vacancy anywhere else in commercial real estate.
More concentrated, because the denominator is small. An empty bay in an eight-bay park is a double-digit share of the income sitting dark, plus that bay's recoveries converted to landlord cost, and the deal's coverage feels it immediately. There is no portfolio of forty other tenants to absorb the event, which is exactly why lenders on small-park deals fixate on the vacant bay in a way that seems disproportionate until you run the coverage math with it dark for a year.
More specific, because industrial demand is not fungible across sizes and specs. The tenant pool for a bay is the set of businesses that need roughly that footage, that loading type, that power, that office share, in that submarket, and the pool's depth varies sharply across those variables. A common-size bay with a drive-in door might see steady inquiry; an oddly deep bay with no yard access might wait quarters for its one right tenant. Underwriting the downtime means underwriting the pool for this bay, not the vacancy statistics for the metro, and the local leasing brokers can describe that pool with unnerving precision if anyone asks them before the model is finished rather than after.
More curable, and this is the industrial advantage worth paying attention to: the cost and speed of curing a vacant bay are the best in commercial real estate. Buildouts are modest, tours are short, small-business tenants decide quickly, and demising flexibility can resize the problem itself, splitting a stubborn large bay into two leasable small ones where construction and zoning allow. The lease-up bet in industrial is frequently a good bet. It is just never a free one, and the pro forma that models the empty bay leasing next quarter at full market with no TI has confused the good version of the bet with the imaginary one.
So the pricing, per the general discipline but with industrial numbers: carry including the recovery leakage, realistic TI for the office share, the commission, and a downtime drawn from this bay's actual pool, then a look at the deal with the lease-up late, because sometimes it is. PropCalc™ models a vacant bay as a lease-up event with its own rent, date, and costs, wired through coverage, and the fictional flex park on this site, linked below, includes exactly such a bay, deliberately, so you can watch what the lease-up assumption does to the whole deal. Move the date. That single input is most of the negotiation.