A business can need warehouse space tomorrow.

So why can leasing it still take 12 weeks?

Emails. Phone calls. Spreadsheets. Attorneys. Site inspections. Negotiations. Documents moving between parties.

And after all of that, the signed lease often disappears into a drawer.

James Holbrook believes the problem isn't a lack of industrial real estate.

It's the infrastructure surrounding the transaction.

In this episode of The AI Edge Podcast, Louis Fernandes sits down with James Holbrook, Founder and Executive Chairman of Warehub, to unpack how more than two decades and roughly 2,500 short-term industrial leasing transactions led him to rethink the entire process.

Warehub is building a structured operating environment designed to connect landlords, tenants, and brokers around verified property information, standardized workflows, transactions, compliance, and eventually the full lifecycle of operating industrial space.

James says a process that can traditionally take roughly 12 weeks can be compressed dramatically inside a more structured environment.

But this isn't a story about removing people from real estate.

James makes the opposite argument:

Technology should remove friction so brokers can spend more time on judgment, strategy, and relationships.

In this conversation:

• Why short-term industrial leasing remains so manual
• What 2,500 transactions taught James about recurring friction
• How information asymmetry slows commercial real estate
• Why tenants increasingly need flexibility instead of long commitments
• How landlords can monetize vacancy and underused space
• Why brokers remain critical even as transactions become faster
• How Warehub approaches verified property information
• Why James rejected a traditional SaaS pricing model
• How the platform aims to compress leasing from weeks to days
• Why businesses often implement AI before fixing their data
• How structured data creates the foundation for useful AI
• Why AI should provide guidance—but not make real estate decisions autonomously
• How Warehub could eventually connect space, labor, equipment, transportation, insurance, and services

James also shares an important founder lesson.

His biggest mistake?

Planning too long.

After years developing the thesis, Warehub is now entering the phase where theory meets the market.

And James believes that five years from now, people may look back and think it's crazy that industrial leasing ever took as long as it does today.

James Holbrook is the Founder and Executive Chairman of Warehub and Founder of Payson Smith Holbrook.

He has spent more than two decades in industrial real estate and estimates he has completed approximately 2,500 short-term lease transactions.

That experience became the foundation for Warehub—a platform designed to create a more transparent, flexible, and efficient industrial leasing environment.

James Holbrook — LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jholbrookpsh/
Warehub — Website

Warehub.com
Warehub — LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/company/warehub-inc/