A renovated warehouse in North Birmingham, Alabama has changed hands for just under $3m, in a deal that on the surface looks like a routine piece of US regional commercial property news. Look closer, however, and the transaction offers a useful proxy for a shift now playing out across industrial property markets on both sides of the Atlantic: older, functionally obsolete warehouse stock is being repositioned, refurbished and re-let or resold at premiums that would have seemed implausible five years ago. For UK investors watching yield compression in prime logistics and rising costs of new-build, the Alabama sale is a small but telling data point in a much larger story.