Location Is No Longer Enough: What Companies Need From Warehouse Space in 2026

By Sam Laird

Location alone no longer drives industrial real estate leasing decisions—power and labor availability now weigh just as heavily for companies evaluating warehouse space, and building flexibility into a lease matters more than ever. That's the view from Jennalyn Macaraeg, who works within the Customer Solutions team at Link Logistics, serving as a single point of contact for some of the firm’s largest industrial tenants across more than 40 North American markets. The team functions as an embedded partner that helps large occupiers manage their real estate needs as they grow, from site selection to power upgrades and lease renewals. In this Q&A, Jennalyn explains how sophisticated occupiers plan years ahead of an actual move, why power and labor are paramount today, and where she sees AI genuinely changing—and not changing—the industry.

What are the biggest priorities you're hearing from warehouse occupiers today, and how have those changed over the past few years?

Jennalyn: The biggest shift is that customers are planning from a disciplined, forecast-driven baseline instead of reacting to short-term swings in demand. Before the pandemic, it was mostly about proximity and cost—customers wanted to be close to their end markets or their suppliers, and they wanted to operate at the lowest possible cost. Then COVID hit and demand exploded. Customers were taking up as much space as they could just to keep pace with growth, and a lot of them ended up with more space than they actually needed once things leveled off.

Since then, most customers have gone through a real rightsizing period. They've optimized their networks and now have a much clearer sense of what normal growth looks like versus that pandemic-era spike, so they can actually forecast two, three, five years out instead of reacting. And even with the uncertainty around tariffs and global trade right now, customers aren't waiting around. They're committing to decisions with what I'd call cautious optimism. They're just also being smarter about maximizing warehouse space—looking at whether they can rack higher or use their existing footprint more efficiently instead of automatically leasing more square footage every time they need capacity.

When companies evaluate industrial real estate today, what factors matter most beyond location and rent?

Jennalyn: Power and labor. It used to be almost entirely about location—as in, is this close enough to my customers or my suppliers? Now it's just as much about whether a site has the power capacity to support automation and equipment charging, and whether there's a labor pool that can actually staff the building once it's running. And if there isn’t enough power currently at a building, industrial occupiers want to know if there is a pathway to get more power through the local utility provider.

That's changing the physical building specs customers ask for, too. Clear heights that used to be fine at 30 feet are now commonly requested at 36 to even 42 feet, because customers want to rack higher and make full use of the cubic space, not just the footprint. Higher clear heights are also needed in order to fit automation equipment, and sometimes floor slabs need to be reinforced to handle the added weight. None of that used to be a requirement—it was a nice-to-have. Now it's table stakes for a lot of our customers.

What distinguishes the organizations that consistently make smart long-term industrial real estate decisions?

Jennalyn: The biggest, most sophisticated customers—the largest e-commerce companies and top 3PLs, for example—don’t treat real estate decisions as simple transactions. They see industrial real estate planning as part of their overall business strategy. Their real estate decision-makers often start to plan five years out and have conversations early alongside colleagues in supply chain, operations, finance, technology and HR. They know exactly how much square footage they have expiring across their entire portfolio, year by year, and they're already working through what they'll need well before any individual lease is close to ending. At that level, nobody is waiting until a lease expires in a year to figure out next steps. That doesn't cut it when you're operating at scale.

On the other end, you have companies that are still growing into their real estate strategy—expanding into new markets or launching new business lines without enough operating history yet to commit long-term. Those customers tend to sign shorter leases while they gather the data they need to understand their real demand, then plan more seriously as that picture becomes clearer.

Companies also look at industrial real estate beyond simply being four walls and a roof. They are looking for buildings that provide optionality: higher clear heights, sufficient trailer parking, ability to expand, and infrastructure that could support robotics and automation. They have learned how quickly demand, trade policy, technology and consumer behavior can change. They are adapting the building to fit their needs, rather than changing their operations to fit the building.

How do you help customers think beyond today's requirements and plan for future growth or changing business needs?

Jennalyn: The Customer Solutions team at Link Logistics helps occupiers plan ahead, mainly by acting as a centralized source of intelligence. The customers we work with are telling us where their business is headed and we help solve for the real estate portion of their overall business plan. We have a lens into where a customer’s requirements intersect with existing vacancies, upcoming lease rolls and development opportunities across multiple markets—sometimes before a customer's own broker network sees them. We'll also get creative with what we already have, reworking a conceptual site plan to build one larger facility instead of two smaller ones if that fits a customer's actual requirements better than a standard spec building would. That's the same flexibility that makes build-to-suit development a good fit for customers whose needs—heavy automation, unusual power loads, a specific layout—don't match what's already available.

We are seeing much more interest in outside-of-the-box solutions than we did a few years ago. Customers are now asking for expansion rights, rights of first offer and rights of first refusal, phased-in occupancy, restructuring an existing lease or creating flexibility around future expansion, and other factors. One advantage businesses gain by working with a landlord of Link Logistics’ scale is that by looking at each customer relationship with a national lens versus just a one-off transaction in each market, we can get creative with these customers. The relationship becomes much more of a strategic partnership.

We also make a point of understanding a customer's internal process. Some multinational companies need up to 90 days to get corporate approval on a deal; knowing that timeline in advance helps us set the right expectations on both sides, instead of assuming a deal has gone cold just because we haven't heard anything in a while. Keeping communication open and honest throughout—especially over a long lease negotiation—is really what prevents things from getting lost in translation.

What trends do you think will have the biggest impact on warehouse users over the next five years?

Jennalyn: Power is only going to become more central to how companies choose sites, and the numbers involved can be significant—anywhere from roughly 2,000 to 3,000 amps for facilities with vehicle charging or automation equipment, up to 5 to 10 megawatts for larger-scale automated or EV-fleet-charging operations. We’re seeing this need rise in markets from Miami to Phoenix and Greensboro to Los Angeles—all across the country, really. A perfectly located building is of no use to a customer if their operation requires significantly more power than the site can deliver.

Consumer expectations are also not going backwards. Whether it’s Amazon delivering packages in 30 minutes or a B2B distributor needing to deliver critical components in a matter of minutes, customers increasingly expect products faster. Automation will allow companies to get dramatically more throughput from their facilities, but it will also change what they require from the physical building.

Data and technology are becoming increasingly important across supply chains. How have they changed the conversations you're having with customers?

Jennalyn: The conversations have become much more precise and data-driven. Customers used to approach us with a requirement that might have been, “We need 300,000 square feet in Dallas.” But now, customers have analyzed demand patterns, transportation routes, labor availability, drive times, proximity to ports and highways, inventory positioning and facility performance at an incredibly granular level. Amazon is a great example of how data has evolved and informed their decisions. When the service level expectation goes from two-day to next-day to same-day delivery, the real estate network has to become increasingly sophisticated. The location of their facilities and their inventory is as much a data issue as it is a real estate issue. And for us as a landlord, that means we need better data as well. The more we understand our buildings, customers, markets and availabilities, the better we can anticipate where customer demand may intersect with our portfolio.

The equipment side matters just as much. As customers add more automation—conveyance systems, robotics, higher racking—that's exactly what's pushing the building requirements I mentioned earlier: taller clear heights, stronger floors, more power. Real estate decisions aren't made in isolation from supply chain and technology strategy anymore. They're all connected, and customers are thinking about them together from the start.

AI is changing how businesses make decisions across many industries. Where do you see the greatest opportunities and limitations for AI in serving industrial real estate customers?

Jennalyn: I think the greatest opportunity is being able to connect an enormous amount of fragmented information and identifying patterns and trends that we otherwise might miss. We can combine vast amounts of data—customer data, lease expirations, labor data, power availability, market rents and so forth—and become better real estate advisors for our customers. It also allows us to be more proactive instead of waiting for customers to tell us that they need space. We can identify signals ahead of a need arising. But the actual relationship side of this business is still deeply human. Understanding what a customer really needs and why, and then negotiating a deal that works for everyone involved—AI can support that transaction, but it can't replace the relationship behind it. Customers still ultimately want a trusted partner sitting across from them at the table. At the end of the day, people want to do business with people they trust. That has not and will not change.

Explore Link Logistics' portfolio of warehouse and distribution space for lease to learn more about industrial real estate opportunities across North America.