Warehousing, Fulfilment and Industrial Real Estate

A warehouse is where a supply chain stops moving, and every hour that goods sit still costs rent, labour, power, insurance and the interest on the inventory itself. For most of the twentieth century warehouses were cheap boxes at the edge of town. E-commerce changed that: an online order needs several times the warehouse space of the same sale through a store, buildings moved closer to customers, and between 2020 and 2022 US industrial vacancy fell to record lows of roughly 3–4% while asking rents rose by double digits a year (Cushman & Wakefield, CBRE and other brokers, reported; exact lows vary by source). Developers answered with the largest construction wave on record, Amazon announced in 2022 that it had built more space than it needed, and vacancy roughly doubled to ~7% by 2024–25 as the new supply landed. By the third quarter of 2026 the cycle had turned again: Cushman & Wakefield put national vacancy at ~6.8% with ~76.6m sq ft of net absorption in the quarter, the strongest since early 2023, and annual asking-rent growth of ~4% (Q3 2026 MarketBeat, as reported by trade press; CBRE counted ~104.6m sq ft of absorption, a different methodology). JLL's Q2 2026 national asking rent was ~$10.45 per sq ft a year (reported). The industry's landlord, Prologis, reported ~95–96% occupancy in Q3 2026 and a data-centre pipeline of ~5.8 GW (reported), a sign that the same land, power and permits that serve logistics are now contested by AI computing. This section explains warehouse types and what drives their cost, the industrial real-estate market and its cycle, Amazon's build-out and pullback, the third-party warehousing (3PL) business, labour, power and land, and how to read the numbers. Two companion files give a worked example of leasing versus building a distribution centre and a checklist for choosing and leasing one.