Most site selection discussions open with the wrong question. Someone puts greenfield and brownfield on a whiteboard and the room starts debating land cost, construction timelines and building specifications before anyone has agreed what the facility actually needs to achieve.
That’s backwards. The site question only makes sense once you know what you’re optimising for.
Many organisations treat Greenfield and Brownfield as strategic decisions. They’re not. Greenfield and Brownfield are execution choices, not business strategies.
The strategy comes first. Are you trying to grow faster, reduce risk, meet a compliance requirement, increase capacity, or create room for future expansion? Only after that becomes clear does the Greenfield versus Brownfield decision start to make sense.
Speed, cost, control and flexibility rarely align.
We’ve sat in enough of these meetings to know the pattern. Teams spend three weeks comparing land parcels and building shells, then realise halfway through that nobody agreed on the one variable that actually decides the outcome: what does this business need most, right now, and in five years.
There are four things a distribution centre decision usually optimises for, and you rarely get all four at once.
Speed gets you into operation fast, but usually at the cost of layout compromise or a higher build cost per pallet position over the facility’s life. Cost gets you the cheapest solution on paper, but often locks in constraints you’ll pay for later through inefficient flows or capped throughput. Control gives you a building designed exactly around your process, but takes longer and carries more delivery risk. Flexibility gives you room to change your operation later, but usually means paying for capacity or land you’re not using yet.
None of these are wrong. They’re trade-offs. The mistake is treating the site decision as a technical exercise when it’s actually a business priorities exercise wearing a technical costume.
An FMCG business chasing a peak trading deadline needs speed above everything else. Missing a launch window or a seasonal peak costs more in lost sales and retailer penalties than an inefficient layout costs in handling time. In that situation, brownfield with layout compromises often wins, even if it costs more per pallet position over the life of the building. The business isn’t optimising for efficiency. It’s optimising for being open on time.
A pharmaceutical distributor facing GDP validation requirements is playing a different game entirely. Temperature mapping, airflow validation, and building fabric requirements mean a brownfield building simply cannot always be qualified, no matter how good the layout looks. In that scenario, greenfield stops being a preference and becomes the only compliant path. The conversation isn’t about which is better. It’s about which one is possible.
A manufacturer adding a finished-goods DC beside an existing plant is in a third position again. The site decision is largely already made, because proximity to the production line usually outweighs any other site criteria. The real question shifts from where to build to what to build: racking configuration, dock ratios, and how much of the existing yard and utility infrastructure the new facility can share.
Before a single site comparison spreadsheet gets built, three questions need answers, and they need to come from the operations and commercial teams, not just the property team.
What does this facility need to deliver in year one, and what does it need to deliver in year five? A distribution centre sized around today’s volume with no view of year three growth is a facility you’ll be arguing about again sooner than planned.
What does being six months late actually cost? For a retailer entering peak season, that number might be measured in lost sales and penalty clauses. For a manufacturer with steady, contracted volume, six months might barely register. Knowing which one you’re dealing with changes the entire site conversation.
What operational compromise can the business genuinely absorb? A tighter dock schedule, a longer travel distance for pickers, a shared yard with another tenant, these are all manageable if you know about them going in. They’re expensive surprises if you find out after occupation.
The teams that get this decision wrong usually made it correctly on paper and incorrectly on judgement. They compared cost per square metre, picked the cheaper option, and moved on. Cost per square metre tells you almost nothing about whether the building will actually work for your operation.
The hidden costs show up later. A brownfield building with an awkward column grid quietly caps your racking efficiency for the next ten years. A greenfield site chosen for land price alone, without checking labour catchment or road access, creates a recruitment and transport cost that never appears in the site acquisition business case.
We’ve walked into facilities where the site decision was made by the property team in isolation, and the operations team only saw the building after the lease was signed. That’s when you hear the sentence every consultant dreads: ‘we didn’t know that was going to be a problem.’ It usually was foreseeable. Nobody asked the operational question early enough.
Run both scenarios, greenfield and brownfield, against the answers to those three questions, not against cost per square metre alone. A brownfield option that gets you operational four months earlier might be the correct commercial decision even at a premium, if the cost of delay is high enough. A greenfield option might be the only workable path if compliance requirements rule brownfield out entirely.
The site question sits downstream of the outcome question.
The most successful organisations recognise that Greenfield and Brownfield are execution choices, not strategies in themselves. Once the business outcome is clear, the right path often becomes obvious. They don’t start by comparing sites. They start by defining success.
Get the outcome question right first, and the site comparison becomes far more straightforward, because you’re now measuring both options against the same yardstick instead of arguing about which one is generically ‘better’.
Talk to LCA Savills. We have been designing, justifying and delivering distribution centres across Asia since 1999, as operators, not report writers. Start with a Warehousing Health Check.
Greenfield development means building on undeveloped land, giving full control over layout, specification and compliance features but taking longer to deliver. Brownfield development means occupying or converting an existing building, which is usually faster and can be cheaper upfront, but often carries layout compromises such as column spacing, clear height or dock configuration that limit long-term operational efficiency.
Brownfield usually makes sense when speed to operation matters more than long-term efficiency, such as an FMCG business facing a peak trading deadline or a retailer needing capacity before a launch window. The cost of being late, in lost sales or contractual penalties, often exceeds the extra handling cost created by a compromised layout over the building’s life.
GDP validation requirements often demand specific temperature mapping, airflow control and building fabric standards that an existing building cannot always meet, regardless of layout quality. When a brownfield building cannot be qualified to those standards, greenfield stops being a preference and becomes the only compliant route available to the business.
An FMCG operator should calculate what a delayed opening actually costs in lost sales, retailer penalties or missed seasonal demand, then compare that figure against the higher long-term cost per pallet position that a compromised brownfield layout may create. In most peak-driven categories, the cost of delay outweighs the ongoing efficiency loss, which is why brownfield often wins despite being less efficient on paper.
Three questions should come before any site comparison: what the facility needs to deliver in year one and year five, what being six months late would actually cost the business, and what operational compromises the business can genuinely absorb. Answering these first turns the site decision into a business priorities exercise rather than a generic cost comparison.
