Industrial real estate has changed dramatically over the past two decades – but the leasing process behind it hasn’t kept pace. That’s the central theme James Holbrook, founder of Payson Smith Holbrook and executive chairman of Warehub, explored on the latest episode of Inside CRE with host Marc Selvitelli, CAE, CREDA’s president and CEO.
After more than 20 years in industrial leasing, Holbrook has seen the same friction points show up repeatedly, regardless of market or client. Here are a few of the key insights from their conversation.
The Building Was Never the Bottleneck
Companies don’t lease space because they love real estate – they lease it to run their operations. “The warehouse, it’s an operational asset within their much larger business strategy,” Holbrook explained.
That distinction points to where real inefficiency lives. It’s not the people involved; brokers, landlords, attorneys, inspectors and engineers are all skilled professionals. The problem is the disconnected process surrounding them: emails, spreadsheets, phone calls, inspections and legal reviews that pile up across dozens of organizations on a single transaction.
Small Disconnects, Big Delays
Holbrook described how seemingly minor duplications – verifying floor plans, activating utilities, reviewing insurance certificates – compound into weeks or months of delay. Multiply that across millions of square feet nationally, and the inefficiency becomes staggering.
A specific project in Seattle crystallized the issue for him. A tight timeline, a qualified tenant and an available property should have made for a fast closing. Instead, structural process issues – not the deal itself – stretched negotiations for weeks. “Nobody was doing anything wrong,” Holbrook said. “The process just wasn’t built for the speed required of the occupier.”
An Operating System, Not Just a Marketplace
That realization led Holbrook to found Warehub, which he distinguishes from a traditional brokerage or listing platform. He described it as “an operating system [that] really coordinates everything that happens throughout the entire life cycle of the transaction.”
Rather than ending at lease execution, Warehub connects verified property data, inspections, documentation and activation into one continuous environment – spanning the full term of the lease, not just the signing.
Short-term Leasing as Strategy, Not Settlement
The conversation also tackled the growing demand for short-term industrial space. Historically, landlords treated vacancy as a cost and short-term deals as a stopgap. Holbrook argued that mindset is shifting: flexibility is becoming its own revenue strategy, giving owners a new lever to optimize their portfolios as demand patterns shift.
The efficiency gains he cited are hard to ignore. A portfolio of 30 to 50 short-term leases that traditionally take 12 weeks to close can be completed on the Warehub platform in a single day.
Technology That Strengthens Brokers, Not Replaces Them
A recurring thread throughout the episode: Warehub was built to support brokers, not sideline them. “It was designed by brokers for brokers,” Holbrook said, “to make their jobs more efficient and to yield increased revenue for their landlords and operationalize faster for their tenants.” By eliminating the administrative drag of short-term leasing, brokers can spend more time on strategy and long-term client relationships – the work that requires their expertise most.
Early adoption numbers back up his optimism about the platform’s reception: since introducing the first tenant requirements, Warehub has seen a 96.3% adoption rate.
Asked to project the industry’s future, Holbrook painted a picture of brokers with more time for strategic advising, landlords benefiting from lower national vacancy through better network optimization, and tenants operating more like sophisticated supply chain managers with access to real-time data. “I think that everybody will operate at peak performance,” he said.
Listen to the full conversation with James Holbrook on the Inside CRE podcast.
This post was created with the assistance of AI tools; all content was reviewed by the author.
