A new article from the Wall Street Journal titled Raising the Roof Making All the Difference in Warehouses examines the growth in the industrial market as e-commerce continues to boom, and the needs of these net-based businesses. An excerpt follows:
Real-estate firm Prologis Inc.'s latest project, a one-million-square-foot warehouse in Tracy, CA, will boast a 40-foot-high ceiling, 25% taller than the typical 32 feet. The project isn't pre-leased, making this the first speculative building of such dimension that the company has built.
Prologis executives said it is going bigger to tap into the e-commerce boom, which is changing the way industrial properties such as warehouses and fulfillment centers are built. E-commerce retailers need more space than do wholesalers that ship goods in bulk to stores, because they transport a vastly wider variety of products in much smaller batches.
"If your stapler breaks, you go online and you order a single stapler. If you're delivering to OfficeMax, you don't go into a warehouse and pull one stapler off the rack, you pull out a whole pallet of them," says Scott Lamson, president of Prologis' northwest region.
As a result, e-commerce companies need workers to pick out and pack each product by hand. They often build multiple mezzanine levels and racking systems known as "pick modules," which are typically about nine feet high. Ceiling heights of 40 feet, rather than the industry-standard 32 feet, allow a distributor to build three levels above the ground floor instead of two, and still leave room for light fixtures and fans.
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