Industrial Real Estate in 2026: Leasing Momentum, Reshoring Demand and What It Means for Warehouse Users

By Sam Laird

What's actually driving industrial real estate right now, and what does it mean for the businesses that lease warehouse space? Leasing volumes are climbing, new manufacturing investment is reshaping where companies want to be located, and landlords are investing in technology and energy efficiency to serve tenants faster and more affordably. Glenn Wylie is executive vice president, head of Asset Management at Link Logistics, where he oversees leasing, property management and construction management across the firm’s North American markets. In this Q&A, Glenn breaks down the market trends behind today's warehouse demand, how technology and energy efficiency are changing the way landlords work with tenants, and what separates a well-run industrial portfolio from an average one.

What does "asset management" mean in the industrial real estate industry?

Glenn: Asset management means different things across the industry, but for us it comes down to our operating model, which really rests on three things: owning great industrial real estate at scale, using that scale to generate data-driven insights, and developing customer-centric solutions. Asset management is the connective layer between the real estate, the data and the customers. In practice, that layer is our people—our Construction team, our Property Management team, and our Asset Management and Leasing teams. Together, they drive decisions about which buildings to own, which to sell, how to develop and how to curate an infill-focused industrial real estate portfolio.

What are the biggest trends shaping industrial real estate demand today?

Glenn: Start with demand: Leasing momentum has continued to accelerate since the fourth quarter of 2025 and into 2026. At Link Logistics, leasing volume is up about 40% year over year. The second quarter of 2026 was our second-best quarter on record, following an all-time best in the fourth quarter of 2025, and the first quarter of 2026 was strong as well. At the same time, supply has been contracting: National construction starts are down roughly 61% from their peak, from about 201 million square feet in late 2022 to about 78 million square feet in the second quarter of 2026. That combination of accelerating demand and constrained supply means availability has likely peaked and is starting to decline, led by bulk leasing. The underlying demand drivers include e-commerce, manufacturing and onshoring, advanced manufacturing and data center spillover.

How are onshoring, reshoring and nearshoring affecting industrial real estate, and where is the impact showing up most?

Glenn: Nearshoring, onshoring and advanced manufacturing continue to show up in our own portfolio. Our Research team has been tracking more than 250 onshoring, reshoring and nearshoring announcements since 2021, representing approximately $1 trillion in planned investment and spanning uses like electric vehicles and batteries, semiconductors, pharmaceutical production, and aerospace and defense. Our strategy is to own and operate real estate at the intersection of these demand drivers, in markets like Atlanta, Phoenix, Dallas-Fort Worth, Pennsylvania, Northern California and Los Angeles. Phoenix is a good example: the semiconductor ecosystem building up around TSMC there implies significant industrial real estate demand from chip onshoring alone. We've also leased significant volume to aerospace tenants in Miami and Orlando, and defense-related demand is showing up in multiple other markets. In terms of building size, manufacturing demand is spread across the board, from roughly 50,000 square feet to 1 million square feet depending on the industry and use, while data center spillover trends more toward bulk-size buildings.

How have tenant expectations for warehouse space changed in the last several years?

Glenn: Warehouse users are looking for a partner today, not just a landlord. Industrial real estate leasing used to be more of a negotiation followed by a largely hands-off relationship until the lease expired. Now, more of our customers want to grow alongside us over time, and we've seen tenants leave a building and later come back. E-commerce also continues to be a major driver of change, and delivery speed is really the force behind it. Standard delivery windows have compressed from three to five days down to two days and, in some cases, to same-day, pushing retailers toward regional distribution and market-hub models that reduce how many times a package is handled. As a new generation of shoppers grows up expecting even faster delivery, that trend will keep accelerating.

How is AI transforming property management and the tenant experience in industrial real estate?

Glenn: For tenants, the clearest impact is speed: faster answers, faster service, faster decisions. That's only possible because we've spent real time organizing our data so our teams can access and act on it quickly. We currently have dozens of active AI technology projects underway. We've also built an AI-powered customer intelligence tool that has captured nearly 3,000 customer conversations, designed to help us understand customer needs at scale and grow those relationships. On the customer-facing technology side, the Link+ tool lets tenants handle service repairs, bill pay, support requests and account management in one platform. All of this technology gives our people better tools to build relationships, make faster decisions and help us curate the best portfolio possible.

How are warehouse owners investing in energy efficiency, and why does it matter for tenants?

Glenn: Energy efficiency has become a core part of how warehouse owners manage costs and risk, not just a sustainability checkbox. That typically means investments like solar, LED retrofits, and infrastructure that builds resilience against grid disruption. At Link Logistics, we've installed close to 70 megawatts of solar, many of our buildings carry LEED certifications, and we've completed close to 30 million square feet of LED retrofits so far this year. Power resilience isn't an afterthought anymore—it's a dedicated work stream focused on understanding both the risks and the opportunities within the communities where we operate. These investments reduce a building's environmental footprint while also helping control the utility and insurance costs that ultimately affect our customers.

How does portfolio scale help control operating costs, including insurance and property taxes?

Glenn: Total operating costs—insurance, property taxes and everything else it takes to run a facility—are a real discussion point with our customers, and portfolio scale is one of our biggest advantages in managing them. Because we own a geographically diverse portfolio with a diverse tenant mix, we carry less concentrated risk than an owner whose assets sit only in a single market, like Miami or California, which insurers and other counterparties tend to see as a higher risk profile. That scale helps us keep costs down, and we're aligned with our customers in wanting to keep taxes, insurance and overall operating expenses as low as possible.

What separates a well-run industrial portfolio from an average one?

Glenn: It's the people. You can point to average building size, infill locations, portfolio scale, data or lower operating expenses, but it's still the people who show up every day who move an organization forward. This industry has changed enormously over the last three to five years, and teams that have lived through those changes and continue to adapt to new technology and new customer expectations ultimately make a portfolio run well.

Learn more about Link Logistics' portfolio of industrial and logistics properties in North America.