With Over €800M On The Market, 2025 Set For Industrial Investment Rebound

After a run of quiet quarters, Irish industrial real estate is seeing its biggest-ever sales bonanza.

Henderson Park, EQT Real Estate, Relm Finance and Iput Real Estate all have major portfolios and assets for sale, with the latter also pushing ahead with its own huge development.

Some of the world's biggest private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds are looking to buy into the sector, circling a market that has maintained leasing momentum and promises steady rental growth. 

The investment surge, strong occupier demand despite brief tariff wobbles, and an economy that continues to defy gravity are primed to spur more than €800M of industrial and logistics space changing hands in the coming months, reshaping Ireland’s logistics market.

“The latest data underlines how balanced the Dublin industrial market has become,” Savills Ireland Director of Research John Ring said. “We’re seeing robust occupier demand alongside a healthy pipeline of new completions, which is helping to prevent excessive upward pressure on rents.”

The biggest of the portfolios came to market in August, as a €550M logistics portfolio owned by Henderson Park was prepared initially for a sale or recapitalisation, with Eastdil Secured and JLL mandated to line up options for Horizon Logistics Park.

Aermont with Sunrise Real Estate, GIC and KKR are among the leading bidders for the portfolio, Green Street News reported. 

The €550M guide price equates to a net initial yield of circa 5% for 1.7M SF of constructed logistics space at Horizon, which generates around €22M annually in rent. The site, located at Swords, also has a 2M SF development pipeline.

Henderson Park assumed ownership of Horizon when it bought Green REIT in 2019, and it has expanded and developed the site, adding around 1M SF during its tenure to create approximately 300 acres of zoned industrial land, with tenants including DHL, Kuehne+Nagel, Bunzl and Fastway.

A major driver in the surge in investment activity is the robust occupier market. Ireland’s industrial and logistics sector saw third-quarter takeup expand by 71% year-on-year, with 492K SF taken across 17 deals, according to Savills Ireland.

That brings year-to-date takeup to 1.6M SF. The largest transaction of the quarter was the letting of 152K SF at Ballymount Logistics Hub to Irish logistics company JMC.

“Last year slowed due to a couple of factors: a lack of supply, but also a hesitancy to make decisions,” Harvey Director Kevin McHugh said. “There were a lot of mandates or requirements live in Ireland, but when it went to board approval in Europe or America, they couldn't get it through, because those markets were not going so well. So there were lots of inquiries, but it was very difficult to get them to land.” 

However, after the summer, he said the market has become buoyant, with a surge in leases on larger properties in particular.

“If you look at the types of occupier taking the majority of space, it continues to be the 3PLS, but they are also doing the logistics on behalf of a huge multinational sector, and that's obviously a big factor,” McHugh said.

Retail is strong on takeup, he added, with pharmaceutical, biopharma, medical devices, engineering and data centre-related companies all creating a diversity of demand. 

Meanwhile, 764K SF was delivered across eight units — the highest quarterly delivery since Q2 2023 — pushing the vacancy rate to 2.4%, though Savills noted that Dublin continued to have one of the lowest vacancy rates in Europe and forecast annual completions to exceed 1.6M SF in 2025, more than four times last year’s figure, with a strong pipeline of smaller units set to deliver in Q4.

That means rents are moving upward, but slowly. They rose by 25 cents per SF in the quarter to €13.75 per SF, with Savills anticipating headline rents reaching €14 per SF by year-end and €15.25 per SF by the end of 2026. Elsewhere in the market, rents above €18 per SF are being achieved for smaller new units in Stadium Business Park and Airport Trade Park.

Alongside the €550M Horizon Park, EQT Real Estate has put a €240M logistics portfolio up for sale, with Eastdil Secured and JLL mandated to sell the properties, which EQT manages on behalf of Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, GIC. It was acquired in 2020 from Morgan Stanley Investment Management. 

There are 32 assets in all, totalling around 1.3M SF, including units in Greenogue Business Park and Baldonnell Business Park, and an annual rent roll of circa €13M.

In addition, Iput has initiated a €55M logistics sale, with Savills mandated to sell the North Gate portfolio, which includes 12 industrial assets. The guide price equates to a net initial yield of around 5.5%, based on annual income from the portfolio of €3.2M. The portfolio has reportedly drawn strong interest from around six or seven potential buyers.

Earlier this year, Iput Real Estate pledged €115M in capital and its logistics land bank to the subfund Iput Nexus Logistics Fund, combined with an equity investment of €115M from CBRE Investment Management’s Indirect Private Real Estate Strategies and the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund.

The full development of Nexus Logistics Park will span 2.5M SF across 17 buildings, with the first phase comprising 1.5M SF across nine units ranging from 53K SF to 460K SF. The first two buildings have been constructed as speculative units, while the remaining seven are scheduled for completion over the next five years.

“The factors driving demand include the rapid growth of e-commerce, the impacts that Covid-19 and Brexit have had on trade patterns, a rapidly changing shift in storage and distribution channels, and the resultant increase in demand for sustainable buildings,” Iput Real Estate CEO Niall Gaffney said at the time.

Elsewere, the appointment by alternate lender Relm Finance of receiver Interpath Advisory over 27 assets owned by a subfund of Mel Sutcliffe’s Goldstein Property ICAV has also seen more stock brought to the market. The Arc portfolio is guiding at a price of €30M through agent Harvey and comprises 11 fully let industrial properties positioned along the M50 motorway from Bray in North Wicklow to Swords in North Dublin.

“We have a situation where, for the first half of the year, for the first time in a number of years, we had quite a range of new buildings reaching completion without being prelet or presold,” Harvey's McHugh said. “What's happening now is that those buildings are being taken up, and you don't have as much of a flow of construction taking place.”