NFI's 3PL Growth, Real Estate Strategy, and Tech Adoption with Michael Landsburg (IAMC Little Rock)

Live from the IAMC conference in Little Rock, the Industrial Advisors podcast interviews Michael Landsburg of NFI about the company's scale and strategy in the 3PL world. Landsburg explains NFI is a 94-year-old, privately held, family-owned supply chain company operating primarily in the US and Canada, with about 80 million square feet in its portfolio (about 17 million owned), roughly 18,000 employees, 5,000 trucks, and 14,000 trailers, serving shipments from Asian ports to home delivery. He discusses how NFI decides between customer-held leases, NFI-held leases, and owning facilities for control, speed, flexibility, and family investment diversification. This includes a shift after the global financial crisis toward leasing more space to third parties. He touches on submarket-by-submarket leasing conditions, NFI's strong performance versus the industry since 2022, a reduced risk posture in matching leases to contracts, ongoing data centralization to enable AI, warehouse automation with fully autonomous robots, and uncertainty over whether Asian-based 3PL growth represents net-new demand or market-share shift.

0:00 Intro and NFI overview

2:10 The history of the 94-year-old family business

4:15 Strategy behind owning vs leasing assets

6:30 Diversifying the portfolio after 2008

8:45 Current industrial market trends and softness

11:00 Leveraging data and AI in logistics

13:15 Autonomous robots in the warehouse

14:50 The impact of Asian 3PL growth

16:00 Closing thoughts and wrap up