When Freight Activity Falls: Asymmetric Warehouse Rent Adjustment and Implications for Sustainable Logistics Space Planning in China, 2018–2025

Durable logistics space commitments create a sustainability problem when capacity and freight demand diverge. We examine whether freight direction contains distinct information for warehouse market monitoring in China. Licensed CSMAR port and warehouse records yield 978 complete city-month observations across 15 continuity-qualified cities during November 2018–December 2025; a fixed 24-city set provides an extension. City and year-month fixed-effects models estimate cumulative associations over lags 0–3, with small-cluster and dependence-robust inference. Average rent and vacancy associations are imprecise. The expansion-minus-contraction rent slope difference is −0.0305, with pointwise 95% intervals excluding zero under three procedures. However, its wild bootstrap p-value of 0.0265 becomes 0.0795 and 0.2120 under three- and eight-test Holm corrections. The contraction slope is 0.0091 and not significant (p = 0.3540). Contrast signs persist across coverage thresholds, although anomaly exclusion weakens significance; a vacancy lead diagnostic also cautions against causal interpretation. The evidence is suggestive of directional differences rather than a confirmed contraction-only effect. We propose sign-sensitive verification and local appraisal before irreversible logistics space commitments. Decision performance and environmental or social benefits remain untested.