Remy Greasley speaks to Ian Henderson and Nick Gerrard following the Insider Property Leaders Lunch: Shaping Industrial Property event, which took place Tuesday 26 Nov at Manchester Hall.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00I'm Ian Henderson. I head up property at ABP and I'm also on the board of the UKWA.
00:17Yeah, it was great. No, it was very enjoyable and it was, it's such a critical time to be
00:24talking about property and logistics in particular. So the audience was great. We got some questions
00:32which was good. So no, it was good. Most of it is opportunity at the moment because in
00:38the industrial market, things are changing. So moving forward, site selection isn't going
00:46to be about, let's just find any unit we can to win the contract. It's going to be more
00:52nuanced. It's going to be where are the people? Where is the power? How do we genuinely build
00:59resilience into our operation? And especially at the peak of the market, it was almost too
01:08easy, well not easy, but to win a contract, you would almost have to take the longer lease,
01:15the bigger unit to win the contract. The market is very different now. And what that will
01:22forces or create is more nuanced decision-making. So it will be what is a unit that's fit for
01:30purpose? Am I going to get the staff for it? Am I going to get the power for it? Am I going
01:36to be amongst like-minded businesses? So I was Group Property Director at Wincanton for
01:4210 years and we acquired probably just over 3 million square feet of space. I would never
01:49have looked at ABP as space, as opportunity. I wouldn't have known about them as far as I was
01:56concerned they were a port operator. The opportunity with ABP is massive because, and this is the
02:04difference to other landlords, we have, it's not just about warehousing, we have container storage
02:11land, we have yard space, we have that diversity of property. The other point is you're sitting in
02:19amongst like-minded businesses. So you almost get this, by definition, you're beginning to
02:26build this, the cluster of buildings. And also, you know, we are in for the long haul. You know,
02:33they often say we're custodians of the ports, we own them, we've got 21 ports. So there is by
02:41definition a long-term relationship between us as landlords and our occupiers, our customers,
02:48the people who are sitting on our site.
03:18The challenges we have are the thirst for data, the threat of the data, the need for energy, and the need for trust in next era, generally.
03:32Two initiatives, two drivers, and we're basically confident with each other. But in part because of the concerns of the
03:41occupiers there, what we're doing is utilising the extraordinary fast internet connection speeds we have with the
03:48cable that's across the island, and that's at the enterprise level. And you'll see that with the, I hope for that,
03:59wind farms that are going into the Irish Sea, there's all sorts of sustainable energy, and also we've sold a farm,
04:08we've run it to provide another source of sustainable energy. And then power, what we're calling initially a
04:15tech demonstrator, we use less energy and we use about 50% less than normal data centres, which are air-cooled,
04:25lift-cooled data centres. And then, if the innovation doesn't end there, to then use the waste heat from those data centres
04:36to then provide the district heating network, the commercial premises, and ultimately housing. So this innovation,
04:44tackling two international critical issues of data growth and the net zero agenda, bringing them together to achieve economic
04:57growth, but making sure that we address our own challenges as well, and to our main backbone.