E-Commerce Driving Industrial Growth Even Faster Due to Pandemic

Retailers are going to be gobbling up real estate space to expand warehouse and logistics operations in response to booming online sales amid the pandemic, according to a new report by Prologis.

The REIT’s research department found in a June study that e-commerce penetration in the US spiked to more than 25% in April, up from 15% at year-end 2019. 

Before the pandemic, Prologis had forecast e-commerce penetration to be about 17% this year. The firm has since revised the estimate up to 20%.

Online retail was growing rapidly even before the coronavirus outbreak, as was e-commerce logistics operations. Prologis’ study of 30 top US retailers showed a 9% expansion of logistics operations footprints last year, compared with annual growth of 6-7% during the previous five years. 

E-commerce companies require, on average, triple the amount of logistics property space as brick-and-mortar retailers, according to Prologis. That’s largely because e-commerce inventory is stored in a warehouse, while brick-and-mortar retailers can keep a portion of inventory on store shelves. 

Observers had expected that the intensity-of-use ratio between online and brick-and-mortar companies would decline as e-commerce operations became more productive. But the ratio has remained between 3 and 3.5 for the past five years, according to Prologis. 

“The stability of this ratio suggests that supply chains were not yet optimized for the future balance between online/in-store sales channels prior to the pandemic,” the report states. “Then, e-commerce penetration rates increased faster in the first four months of 2020 than in the prior decade, fueled by the stay-at-home economy.” 

The study also shows that retailers are driving about 40% of the overall demand for logistics real estate. Within that industry, brick-and-mortar companies account for 60-70% of the demand while e-commerce firms are spurring 30-40% of the demand.

Prologis expects that the “push for resilient supply chains will likely lift the intensity of use for both e-commerce and brick-and-mortar customers, while persistently higher e-commerce space needs support our expectations for demand tailwinds.” 

In an earlier report, Prologis noted that consumer demand for certain products during the pandemic caught some retailers off-guard as they’d scaled down their inventory to have more efficient supply chains. Now, those same retailers will likely seek to increase inventory and warehouse space. 

Looking ahead, Prologis predicts inventory growth of 5-10%, which equates to additional logistics space needs of 285,000 to 570,000 square feet in the US.

“We expect this shift to lead to broad-based logistics real estate demand growth, with an emphasis on large consumer populations, access to transportation and modern facilities,” the firm stated.