This strong performance was largely driven by a robust year-end, with €12 billion invested in Q4.

However, the market cooled in Q1 2025, with logistics investment volumes falling to €7.5 billion—a 38% decline from Q4 2024 and 16% lower year-on-year.

Comparing Q1 2025 against Q1 2024, the largest increases in annual terms have been in the Czech Republic (+1358%), Hungary (+445%) and Ireland (+371%). Of the core European logistics markets, the largest increases were in Italy (+95%), Spain (+81%) and Poland (+47%), according to the international real estate advisor.

After declining in 2024, average European industrial vacancy levels are starting to rebound, rising by 71bps in the first quarter, from 5.91% to 6.62%. This follows several quarters of deceleration in the vacancy rate growth.

Andrew Blennerhassett, Associate Director, UK & EMEA Logistics Research at Savills, says: “With the geopolitical environment remaining highly unstable, we would expect take-up to decline in Q2 with a potential V-shaped recovery by the end of the year. The best historical example of a change in the status quo for global trade is Brexit. Looking back take-up in the UK fell by 30% in 2017 post-referendum before recovering the following year, rising by 41%.”

Peter Kirk, Director in Savills pan-European logistics team, says: “A notable trend in 2025 is the shift in investor preference from big-box, single-tenant assets to multi-let properties. Multi-let assets are increasingly attractive due to their ability to diversify tenant risk, offering greater resilience compared to single-tenant investments. We have also seen that debt has become cheaper and more accretive in the last few weeks.”

“In terms of location, Savills European Logistics census in 2024 identified a shift towards core locations by investors. Germany (65%), France (56%) and Spain (54%) saw the strongest interest.”