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Prime logistics rents across Europe's core distribution corridors were flat in the second quarter, the first quarter without growth since the pandemic-era e-commerce boom began. Rents in the Netherlands, Germany's Rhine-Ruhr region and northern France had more than doubled over the preceding five years; that run has now paused.
The headline number masks a widening split beneath it. Occupiers deploying warehouse robotics and automated sortation now specify buildings with taller clear heights, reinforced slabs and heavier power loads to support them — a narrower band of stock that is still seeing rental growth even as the wider market plateaus, because so few existing sheds can be retrofitted to specification. A wave of speculative development commissioned at the peak of the cycle, built to older, non-automation-ready standards, is completing now and adding vacancy in exactly the submarkets that can't support the newer occupier requirements.
"Occupiers spent three years taking any box they could get. Now the ones running automated fulfilment want a much more specific building, and there simply isn't enough of it — that's a supply story, not a sign logistics has stopped mattering."
The slowdown is uneven for the same reason. Last-mile urban logistics assets close to major population centres continue to see rental growth, constrained by limited available land, while older big-box space on the edge of secondary cities — the format least suited to robotics retrofits — is where the new vacancy is concentrated. Investors are repricing accordingly, with yields on prime, automation-ready logistics holding firm even as generic big-box yields have softened.
