El Segundo vs. Long Beach: how Southern California's two 'Space Coast' industrial markets actually compare

Long Beach is not the only Southern California submarket aerospace and defense tenants are fighting over. El Segundo has been doing the same thing, just longer and at a tighter vacancy number, and it is worth understanding how the two actually differ before you assume either one sets the comp for the other.

The vacancy gap is real

El Segundo closed 2025 with industrial vacancy at 3.4 percent, and South Bay overall posted 9.8 million square feet of gross absorption for the year, up 16.2 percent from 2024, driven in part by space companies, government contractors, and tech startups competing for the same buildings. That is a tighter number than anything reported in the Long Beach Airport submarket, which went from roughly a dozen available buildings to zero over about a year, but from a much smaller base.

Why El Segundo got there first

Varda Space Industries, which builds orbital pharmaceutical processing and hypersonic reentry hardware, leased 205,443 square feet at 2031 E. Mariposa Avenue in March 2026, on top of 50,000 square feet it had already leased a mile away. The Mariposa building was constructed in the 1940s as an aircraft facility, the same story Long Beach tells about its own legacy Douglas and Boeing-era stock. El Segundo's advantage is proximity: LAX, the South Bay's research institutions, and a talent pool that has been there longer.

Why Long Beach still has room to run

What Long Beach has that El Segundo mostly does not is scale. Anduril's roughly 1.2 million square foot Douglas Park campus, and the port's own rail and wharf infrastructure, are the kind of large-format, large-parcel deals that are hard to find in a built-out submarket like El Segundo. If your building is under 50,000 square feet, you are competing with El Segundo's tightest numbers. If it is a large-format site with real acreage, Long Beach is where that conversation is actually happening right now.

What this means for you

Do not price your Long Beach building off an El Segundo comp, or the reverse, without checking which side of that size and scale line your property sits on. The two markets are feeding the same tenant pool, but they are not interchangeable, and the broker quoting you a number should be able to tell you why.