Long-term industrial and logistics take-up has remained remarkably stable across decades of economic cycles, according to new Savills research presented at the Shedmasters conference in Lisbon last week.
The data provided a resilient backdrop to a keynote by Lord William Hague, who warned over 500 industry leaders attending the 26th Shedmasters event that the global market has entered a volatile new chapter defined by simultaneous “danger and excitement.”
Thirty years of structural stability
Opening the session, Kevin Mofid, Head of EMEA Logistics Research at Savills, presented the longest available time series of industrial take-up to demonstrate the market’s structural resilience. Despite the dot-com crash, the Global Financial Crisis and the pandemic, the data shows a remarkable consistency:
- US resilience: Annual take-up as a proportion of total stock has averaged 3.5% since 1996.
- UK stability: Take-up has consistently run at approximately 1.5% of total stock since 2000.
- Current momentum: European take-up in 2025 reached 301.8 million sq ft, some 8% above the pre-pandemic average, with vacancy falling to 6.36%.
“When you zoom out and look at three decades, the world throws shock after shock at this market, and it keeps absorbing them,” Mofid said. “The question for 2026 is not whether demand exists, but what form it takes.”
The new drivers: defence and data
Mofid identified a fundamental shift in occupier priorities, with resilience replacing just-in-time efficiency as the dominant logic of supply chain decision-making. This is driving substantial new requirements from non-traditional sectors:
- Defence: Savills research projects 398 million sq ft of defence-related logistics demand across EMEA over the next decade.
- Data centre ecosystems: AI and data infrastructure are creating a ripple effect, generating an estimated 8 million sq ft of secondary logistics demand for related supply chains.
Supply crunch deepens as spec pipeline collapses
The presentation concluded with a warning on the supply side. The UK speculative development pipeline has fallen 67% since its 2022 peak, and there is now less than one year’s supply of second-hand Grade A stock available across the country.
Mofid concluded: “The market continues to show resilience despite the current geopolitical situation. With the occupier profile becoming ever more diverse and demanding of good quality units. With both the UK and European speculative development pipelines declining, there is the possibility of a shortfall in supply as we head into 2027”
Hague: entering ‘Chapter Three’
Building on Savills’ market data, former UK Foreign Secretary Lord William Hague framed the current geopolitical environment as the third great chapter of the post-war era.
He said that Chapter One was the Cold War, characterised by danger but little dynamism. Chapter Two, he argued, was globalisation, excitement with manageable risk. He then told the audience that Chapter Three, which began in earnest this year, is both simultaneously dangerous and exciting, pointing to the most transformative technologies in history (AI and quantum computing) arriving at the same moment as geopolitical fracture and energy instability.
Hague argued that businesses and countries that thrive in this era will be those that bring talent and capital together to reinvent themselves and their supply chains.
