As Midlands warehouse supply tightens, businesses are looking up - not out

Businesses don’t always need to look for larger premises when they need more capacity. Often, the answer is to make better use of the existing space.

Warehouse space across the Midlands is getting harder to find, more expensive to take, and slower to deliver. New development is cooling, high-quality availability remains tight, and prime rents are still moving upwards - leaving many operators with the same conclusion: they need more space than they currently have.

The latest industrial and logistics research underlines how quickly the market has tightened. Colliers reported that the Midlands accounted for 61% of UK industrial and logistics take-up in the first half of 2026, while availability in the East Midlands fell by 20% over the same period. In the West Midlands, vacancy dropped to 4.7%, its lowest level since late 2023. Speculative warehouse completions are also heading for their lowest annual total since 2018.

Knight Frank’s Midlands research tells a similar story on cost. Prime industrial rents in Birmingham have risen 4.2% year on year to £12.50 per sq ft for units over 50,000 sq ft, with Grade A vacancy now at 3.2%. For businesses already feeling the pinch, relocating can look like the obvious next step. In practice, it is often slower, more expensive and more disruptive than it first appears.

Finding a suitable unit, negotiating a lease, fitting it out and moving operations can take months. Rents are higher. Dilapidations, deposits and downtime all add cost. For many Midlands manufacturers, distributors and warehouse operators, the bigger building arrives too late and at a price that puts further pressure on the business.

According to Kingswinford-based JRC Industrials, a lot of that pressure is being misdiagnosed. The feeling that a site has been outgrown is often not a shortage of square footage at all. It is uncontrolled space: mixed traffic sharing the same floor, processes overlapping, offices sitting in the middle of operations, and stock spreading into every available corner.

When people, vehicles, production, and storage all occupy the same uncontrolled environment, the building starts to feel smaller than it is. Flow breaks down. Safety becomes harder to manage. Productivity drops. The instinct is to look outwards for a larger unit, when the more immediate opportunity is to take back control of the space already in use.

That is where partitioning and mezzanine floors come in. Rather than taking a bigger building, JRC Industrials designs, manufactures, and installs systems that turn an existing warehouse or factory into a controlled environment - separating processes, lifting storage and offices off the operational floor, and giving the business room to flow.

Steel partitioning can create self-contained storage areas, offices within the warehouse, production cells, and designated safety zones, without the cost or disruption of a full relocation. Mesh, single skin, and double skin systems allow businesses to divide space according to how the operation actually works, rather than how the empty shell was originally laid out.

Mezzanine floors take that thinking upwards. By using unused height, a mezzanine can add storage, picking areas, packing lines, or office space without increasing the building’s footprint. Combined with partitioning, it creates a clearer split between people, product, and process; the opposite of the uncontrolled floor that so often triggers a search for more space.

The result is a building that works harder; stock has a home, offices are separated from the shop floor, traffic is directed, and processes can run in sequence rather than in competition with one another. Businesses gain usable capacity from the unit they already occupy, instead of paying more to move into one that simply repeats the same uncontrolled layout at a larger scale.

Josh Cartwright, Director of JRC Industrials, said:

“Businesses don’t always need to look for larger premises when they need more capacity. Often, the answer is to make better use of the existing space.

At JRC Industrials, we help businesses maximise their existing footprint through solutions such as mezzanine floors, which make use of valuable vertical space and can provide significant additional floor area without the need to expand the building itself.

Alongside this, steel partitioning allows businesses to create clearly defined and safe working zones within their premises. Whether that’s separating production areas, storage, offices or pedestrian routes, creating dedicated spaces can improve safety, organisation and day-to-day efficiency.

Ultimately, it’s about making a building work harder for the business. By maximising available space while creating safer, more efficient working environments, businesses can increase capacity and productivity without necessarily having to take on larger premises.”

As supply continues to tighten and rents remain under pressure, more Midlands operators are expected to look at the cubic capacity of the buildings they already have. For those businesses, the question is no longer only whether they need more space, it is whether the space they have is being allowed to work to its fullest potential.




ENDS

Notes to Editors

For further information, please contact:

Josh Cartwright – Director
JRC Industrials Ltd
Email: josh@jrcindustrials.com
Tel: 07359 063245
81 High Street, Kingswinford, West Midlands DY6 8AX
www.jrcindustrials.com


About JRC Industrials

JRC Industrials designs, manufactures and installs industrial and office partitioning systems, mezzanine floors, suspended ceilings and integrated safety products. Based in Kingswinford in the West Midlands, the company works with warehouses, factories, offices and modular buildings across the UK to maximise space, improve safety and help operations flow.


Sources
Colliers, Industrial & Logistics Market Pulse, July 2026
https://www.colliers.com/en-gb/research/industrial-logistics...
Knight Frank, LOGIC Midlands Q2 2026
https://www.knightfrank.co.uk/site-assets/research/report-pd...