Link Logistics CEO Luke Petherbridge goes Inside the ICE House to discuss the resilience and evolution of industrial real estate in a rapidly changing economy. He highlights the rise of last-mile logistics and e-commerce demand as key drivers shaping the sector’s growth. Petherbridge explains how Link leverages scale, data, and customer service to support tenants ranging from global enterprises to small businesses. He also outlines how AI and technology are enhancing operations, insights, and tenant experiences across the portfolio.

Episode 538: Link Logistics CEO Luke Petherbridge on Supply Chains, Speed and Last-Mile Demand

Inside the ICE House

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Inside the ICE House

## Transcript

Welcome to another episode of the Inside the ICE House podcast. Today's guest is Luke Petherbridge. He is the CEO of Link Logistics. Luke, thanks so much for joining us Inside the ICE House. Happy to have you here. Luke Petherbridge Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here. Luke Petherbridge So I want to kick things off at a high level. When you just step back and look across the industrial real estate landscape today, how would you describe the overall health of the sector and I guess some of the key trends that are either driving improvement or potentially stagnation?

Luke Petherbridge Yeah, I think, well, let's start with Link. You know, Link, we are one of the largest landlords or owners of industrial real estate in the United States. We have over 400 million feet. We're part of the Blackstone ecosystem. We have about 8000 customers. We're in nearly every city and a good way to think of it is like about a little over 4% of US GDP is flowing through our customers' buildings or our customers who are in our buildings. So I think we have a pretty good purview on that. But what we're seeing,

today, I think it's balanced optimism or strong resilience, actually. And where we're seeing that, you know, if you really think about the US economy, we're seeing, you know, this e-commerce penetration accelerate, you know, we're going to talk about AI, but AI, agentic commerce is sort of pushing that. But you see Amazon or Walmart, you know, their speed to last mile to delivery. So we're seeing that as a pretty big buoy. You know, the economy continues to grow, which is another big source of demand for us.

And then, you know, you're seeing advanced manufacturing, defence, and also just this infrastructure build out, whether it's data centres, whether it's power and infrastructure, all of that that's happening, this huge amount of capital deployed throughout the country is driving significant amount of demand pickup.

And you're seeing that throughout, you know, the Sunbelt for sure, the Midwest areas that have probably been a little bit slower post-COVID. So you have this really good diversified, multifaceted demand building up. And on the flip side, we've got, you know, record low new supply. It's like a decade low. So we're not building new warehouses at the speed we were in COVID, which is probably prudent. So right now, it feels like it's pretty strong at the moment, actually.

And in your answer, you mentioned a couple words, you mentioned last mile. And now Link is one of the largest owners and operators of last mile industrial real estate in North America. So for the listeners who don't know what that term means, just explain last mile real estate for us.

Yeah. So I think of it as proximate to the end user. So when you think of buying something on Amazon or getting a part to a Boeing facility, people aren't waiting four or five days to get it anymore, Lance. It's li...

Episode 538: Link Logistics CEO Luke Petherbridge on Supply Chains, Speed and Last-Mile Demand

Transcript

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Episode 538: Link Logistics CEO Luke Petherbridge on Supply Chains, Speed and Last-Mile Demand

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.