Infill Centers, the Solution to the Last Mile

Kurt Strasmann is a senior managing director at CBRE.

LOS ANGELES—Shippers are rapidly shifting from delivery and logistics strategies with multiple infill centers, according to a new study from CBRE. With the push for online retailers to deliver goods purchased online as quickly as possible, retailers are finding that multiple infill center locations in an inner city are the best solution to solve for the last mile.

“Traditionally, you had big box fulfillment centers that you would place your orders in, and they would get the order to you in three to five days,” Kurt Strasmann, senior managing director at CBRE, tells GlobeSt.com. As this industry has matured and is evolving, speed is used as a very important component of retailer’s strategies. The most efficient means to get the customer products faster is to locate closer and closer to where your customers are located. What has happened is that these retailers are slowly migrating to infill centers in inner cities to achieve same-day delivery. They have very strong analytics to determine where their customers live, what they are buying and what their purchasing powers are. Slowly, these companies are leasing small 20,000 to 100,000 square feet of space in the inner city.