Nearshoring and e-commerce have made industrial warehouses coveted elements, but as demand increases there is an element that is increasingly valued and difficult to access: location.

In e-commerce, competition has focused not only on having increasingly lower prices and a broad catalog, but also on reducing delivery times by moving closer to city centers, where large plots of land are scarce.

But for Eduardo Neuman, general director of Interlogix, a developer, there is a solution: vertical warehouses. The idea came from the other side of the world, in Hong Kong, where he was impressed by a 250,000 square meter building in a vertical logistics park that has ramps that go up to the 20th floor.

Check here: Solili Industrial Report 3Q 2023, limited supply limits growth in industrial demand in Mexico

“We saw that all the warehouses in the Vallejo and Iztapalapa area were being absorbed and the remodeling of other old ones that also began to be installed. We began to see a discourse that they were last mile places, but that was not really that,” he adds. The “last mile” is the journey between a distribution company and the end user, the shortest part of the process and which is usually short distances.

For Neuman, the last mile should be almost literal. Be practically at the door to speed up deliveries and reduce transportation costs. So for a year and a half he devised a way to build storage spaces that went beyond warehouses, with patios that could accommodate trailers and platforms that support heavy loads.

Planning that was carried out in consultation with companies in the electronic commerce sector, to understand their needs. By 2022, the Lomas I building will be completed, just a few steps from Constituciónntes Avenue and Observatorio.

In the next 12 months, the first 30 thousand square meters will be completed within Mexico City in a second stage of the finished building, in Santa Fe, Centenario and Postes.

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The difference with other types of vertical storage places that exist is that all the buildings are designed to be large-scale distribution centers, "all our business units can fit 53-foot trailers, vans which can be three and a half tons, or sprinters,” explains Eduardo Newman.

To achieve this, the key is the size of the land since the maneuvers of the vehicles and the building itself must be considered. At the same time, they focus on building resistant buildings that have freight elevators that can also accommodate large objects or pallets that are unloaded directly from the trailers.

After their expansion in Mexico, they focus on cities like Guadalajara and Monterrey where spaces are increasingly scarce in urban areas.

In Solili you can consult industrial warehouses available in Querétaro and Tijuana

Original note