The Next Type of Industrial Building May Not Have a Name Yet

Every change is the present before it becomes history; that is why those who live through it are at a disadvantage compared with those who remember it, because they know what is happening, but not yet what it is becoming.

In 1906, long before the fulfillment center existed as a recognizable category of industrial real estate, Sears was trying to solve a fairly concrete problem in Chicago. The orders it received by mail had multiplied to the point that storing merchandise and finding it when someone bought it was no longer enough, because each order required identifying different products, moving them from different parts of the facility, and bringing them together in time to be packed, sorted, and shipped.

Sears responded by turning that operation into a system in which each order was assigned a destination and a 15-minute window. To make the system work, conveyor belts and spiral chutes moved merchandise between different parts of the facility, while pneumatic tubes transmitted information. That coordination eventually reached the building itself. Plans from 1905 show that some of those mechanisms were already incorporated into the design, and the historical record of the complex concludes that the processes and work patterns used to handle orders determined the building’s configuration.

Seen from 2026, what Sears built is extraordinary, but so is the sequence that led to that building, as an operational problem produced a system whose physical requirements ultimately determined the property that had to contain it. The building could therefore change before any real estate category could describe what it had become¹. And that gap between transformation and recognition is what we are experiencing again 120 years later.

This time, automated storage and retrieval systems and mobile robots are beginning to impose new requirements on the building. In some cases, that influence extends even to its geometry. Academic research on automated warehousing has examined how length and height can be optimized based on equipment travel time, while robotization is prompting a reconsideration of aisles, levels, stations and input and output points.

When those needs exceed the capabilities of an existing building, the operation can start determining the property before it is even built. Prologis estimates that, in 2025, four out of 10 build-to-suit projects incorporated automation² and notes that the ability to design a building around different technologies and future operational needs is driving this type of development. In the most intensive systems, this can require up to 20 times more power capacity than other automated solutions, along with specific requirements for clear height, floor load and surface, column spacing, and technology infrastructure.

In this way, automation stops being merely something installed inside the building and begins to determine how it must be built, a difference that is already having consequences in the market. According to the same Prologis analysis, automated properties recorded rents approximately 10% higher than non-automated properties after controlling for market and size. At the same time, their occupants showed a higher likelihood of renewal and lease terms roughly one year longer.

None of this automatically turns an automated warehouse into a different class of property. But if the operation begins to determine its geometry, infrastructure, design and economic performance, the differences within that category are no longer minor. In that sense, the sequence that emerged with Sears may be repeating itself, although with one difference. If time then became a space constraint, today automation is turning processing capacity into a constraint on the building.

In simple terms, that means it is no longer enough to install machines capable of moving more merchandise; the building must provide the conditions they need to do so. The question is when that dependence stops modifying one class of building and starts defining another.

What do you think? Are we looking at increasingly sophisticated warehouses or a new class of property that we still call a warehouse? While we find a name for it, you can track these buildings in SiiLA Market Analytics or write to us at contacto@siila.com.mx.

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¹ The comparison is retrospective and does not imply that Sears created what is now known as the fulfillment center or that there is a demonstrated direct historical relationship between its Chicago facility and that building type. Historical documentation shows that Sears developed a system for locating, assembling, packing and shipping orders, and that the associated processes and work patterns determined the design of the Merchandise Building. The reference to the fulfillment center serves only as a contemporary framework for interpreting those operational and real estate characteristics, not to attribute its origin to Sears. Sources: Daniel M. G. Raff y Peter Temin, “Sears, Roebuck in the Twentieth Century: Competition, Complementarities, and the Problem of Wasting Assets”, NBER/University of Chicago Press, 1999; “Historic American Buildings Survey”, Sears Roebuck & Company Mail Order Plant, Merchandise Building, Library of Congress, HABS IL-1187-A.

² Source: Prologis Research, “Applied Automation in the Warehouse Boosts Value Across Stakeholders,” Prologis, 2026. The document does not specify the number, geographic location or universe of build-to-suit projects used to estimate that 40% incorporated automation in 2025. The rent data compare automated and non-automated properties after controlling for market and size; the renewal and lease-term indicators are based on Prologis portfolio leasing data from 2021 to 2025.