Speed Built In—The Real Differentiator for 2026 Site Selection Projects

At the start of 2025, the mood around industrial investment was unmistakably confident. Capital was available. Incentives were abundant. Projects were being announced across nearly every sector of the economy. On paper, companies appeared to have more location options than ever.

By the end of the year, that sense of abundance had largely evaporated.

What Area Development’s reporting revealed over the course of 2025 was not a slowdown in ambition, but a collision with reality. Again and again, across sectors and geographies, site selection stopped behaving like an optimization exercise and began to resemble something closer to constraint management. The question was no longer which location offered the best mix of cost, incentives, and access. It became which location could actually deliver — on time, at scale, and without late-stage surprises.

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