Thanks to e-commerce demand for warehouses in urban areas is increasing.
In the Brussels-Capital Region especially, the number of warehouses and industrial buildings in general is falling. What is the main reason for this?
And why has e-commerce created new demand?
- Reconversion:In the early 2000s, the Brussels Region granted a lot of permits for the conversion of industrial sites into housing, lofts, etc. However, about ten years ago, it reversed course, realising that it was losing a significant diversity of small businesses, craft industries, artists’ studios, etc. in the process. The trend now is to keep the tertiary sector in the city, to redevelop the urban mix and therefore to encourage the renovation of industrial sites rather than demolishing them, especially as demand has evolved thanks to e-commerce.
- E-commerce as a new real-estate player:As always when it comes to the law of supply and demand, scarcity makes the market! There’s a growing shortage of warehouses, and the reason is clear, but on the other hand demand is increasing, thanks in particular to new technologies, new professions and e-commerce… Why?Big organisations such as Amazon, Alibaba, bol.com etc., which deliver to Belgium, have huge logistics warehouses on the outskirts of our cities. Amazon alone has opened 15 new warehouses covering over 100,000m² in Europe this year!Alongside these giants, all the retailers, such as Zara, also need smaller warehouses in urban centres, called ‘buffer’ warehouses, to enable them to respond more quickly to demand. Reliable delivery is a strategic factor in e-commerce. Amazon, for example, understood this before anyone else and devotes colossal resources to it, with deliveries in less than twenty-four hours. And in the future, order processing will be even faster, thanks in particular to AI!
Conclusion
This is just one of many examples of how e-commerce can revolutionise professional real estate too, with ever-increasing demand. Of course, other business sectors are also major consumers of warehouses and industrial property in the broadest sense, such as supermarkets, large retailers, the automotive industry, etc. So this is a class of property that is doing well and still has a bright future ahead of it!
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