Forget about Space…. THINK CUBE

During my time at GLP, one of the world’s leading logistics real estate companies, we faced a fundamental question:
How do we create and justify premium value for high-quality warehouse facilities?

Traditionally, industrial real estate has been measured by square meters — rent per square meter, cost per square meter, and building size.
But we realized square meters only tell part of the story.
A warehouse is not a flat piece of land. It is a three-dimensional asset.
The real value of a logistics facility comes from how much operational capacity it can create within its entire volume.
That led us to a different way of thinking:
The future value of warehouses will not only be measured by square meters. It will be measured by cube.

For decades, warehouses focused on optimizing floorspace. But every warehouse has three dimensions: length, width, and height.
The biggest untapped opportunity is often above the warehouse floor.
This is where AS/RS changes the economics of logistics.
Compared with traditional selective pallet racking, AS/RS systems can typically increase pallet storage capacity by approximately 50% within the same building footprint — creating more capacity without adding more real estate.

Automation is no longer only a labor productivity solution.
It is becoming a real estate productivity solution.
The future warehouse will not necessarily be the largest.
It will be the one that creates the most value from every cubic meter.

Increase cube.