PUBLISHED DAILY · 5AM
Business & money
Real estate, manufacturing and logistics, tribal economy, wine country, capital markets — the business of California's Inland corridor.
From the Long Read
Follow Inland Empire business?
Get every deal, move, and closure in your inbox — Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Free.
Business Archives
The Robots Didn't File These WARN Notices
Citrus Belt Review: The national story says AI is taking warehouse jobs. The corridor's actual filings tell a different one — for now.
The IE's job engine has flipped from warehouses to hospitals
Citrus Belt Review: Warehousing employment is down 92,000 nationally from its early-2025 peak, and the IE's own data shows the same trade — logistics shedding, healthcare hiring.
Premier, Penwood buy two Rialto Amazon warehouses for $270M
ONT cargo climbs while IE warehouse jobs keep bleeding
Citrus Belt Review: Air freight through ONT is up double digits most months this year — even as the region's warehouses shed thousands of jobs. One slice of IE logistics is booming while the other contracts.
Why the data-center fight hasn't reached the Inland Empire
Citrus Belt Review: The IE core has no hyperscale proposals and no bans — because the binding constraint is power, and so far it's kept the fight 75 miles east. The tell: a Riverside company drove past its own home market to build six data centers in Coachella.
Why buying a used truck is a harder bet in the IE than almost anywhere else
Citrus Belt Review: A used Class 8 truck used to be freight's cheap way in. For an IE owner-operator right now it's a high-stakes bet — caught between a federal emissions deadline that may move, California rules stuck in court, and a price jump everyone expected that still hasn't hit.
Demolition begins on the Ontario warehouse lost to fire
Ontario airport starts the clock on a fourth terminal
IE Business Daily: ONT BOLD — a fourth terminal, a six-story garage, and full upgrades to the two existing terminals — clears its first hurdle. The buildout could run 10 years or more.
FedEx Freight is now independent — and it's coming after the IE's mid-market shippers
Citrus Belt Review: The spinoff changes no lanes and no jobs on day one. What matters locally is the stated strategy: a standalone carrier with bleeding volume hunting the $9B SMB segment — in the metro with the densest concentration of those shippers in the western U.S.
IE tomato prices hit an eight-year high as tariffs, freezes, and diesel stack up
The Citrus Belt Review: Romas and slicers run $1.50–$2.50 a pound across Inland Empire shelves right now — and wholesale buyers are getting hit harder than shoppers.
Walmart buys its Riverside cold-storage facility for $223M
The Real Deal: Walmart bought the building it had rented since 2010 — a bet on cold storage while the rest of the IE industrial market sits at 8.1% vacancy.
Walmart pays $223M for the Riverside cold-storage building it's leased since 2010
ConnectCRE: About $440 a square foot for the 507,000 sf temperature-controlled plant on Columbia Avenue — a tenant turning owner in a cold-storage market where demand keeps outrunning supply.
IE warehouse vacancy hit 7.8% in the first quarter
China-based 3PL takes a 500,000 sf Ontario warehouse that sat vacant two years
MacLeod & Co.: The building sat empty nearly two years because most large tenants chase 32-to-40-foot ceilings; this 3PL runs fine at 30-foot clear — and the terms (large free rent, a big TI allowance, a below-market rate) read like a tenant's market.
Skechers ends Moreno Valley temp-staffing contract; 725 workers laid off
SoCal ports cleared 6.49 million TEUs in 2026's first four months
Pacific Merchant Shipping Association: Combined San Pedro Bay container traffic ran 11–32% above pre-pandemic 2019 through April, even as analysts had forecast year-over-year declines.
Walmart, Clarion buy IE big-box warehouses as vacancy hits 8.5%
Cushman & Wakefield IE MarketBeat: Five big-box sales closed in Q1, each over 390,000 sf. Walmart paid $220 psf for a 507,000-sf Riverside box; Clarion bought a million-sf building from LACERA for $140M.
Closing IE's degree gap is worth $1 trillion, Georgetown says. A local economist disagrees.
IE Business Daily: Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce projects a $1 trillion gain for the IE economy if 70% of working-age adults across all demographic groups held a credential. Jay Prag of the Drucker School says the IE jobs base can't absorb that many degree holders.
ONT freight grows 15% in March; passenger growth hits four-month streak
Inland Empire Business Journal: First-quarter passenger volume up 4.1% and air freight tonnage up 12.7% year-over-year at Ontario International Airport.
Rivian moves into a 49,000 sf Perris building
Inland Empire Business Journal: The 49,000 sf Dedeaux building goes to Rivian as East IE leasing tops 6M square feet in Q4 2025 — the first time since Q3 2022.