Reports from Cushman’s this week state that “Britain could run out of warehouse space within a year, as supply chain disruption and a boom in online shopping propel demand to record levels”.
Warehouse demand is being driven by manufacturing and logistics companies as they respond to supply chain issues, Brexit and the Covid pandemic.
Available warehouse space in the UK has fallen below 50million square feet. This may sound a lot but it’s the lowest level since Cushman started tracking the sector in 2009 and it’s roughly the same amount of space already taken up by businesses in the first nine months of 2021.
“Ecommerce and post and parcel [companies] took an average of 6 million square feet [a year] between 2015 and 2019. In the last couple of years it has been in excess of 15 million square feet a year; that gives a sense of the scale of demand in this sector” commented Bruno Beretta of Cushman & Wakefield.
Photo by Adrian Sulyok on Unsplash
