Tritax London Logistics Fund Targets £1.5B Portfolio After Transformational Year

Fresh from a £200M equity raise and with another £150M flowing into the fund in the first quarter, Tritax London Logistics Fund is betting big on the capital’s urban logistics market. That means it could hit £1.5B by the end of 2027, backed by a new base of international investors.

Tritax London Logistics Fund Director Nick Ireland said 2025 had been a “transformational year” for the logistics investment vehicle, marked by a strategic overhaul, broader buying remit, reshaped investor base and renewed deployment as capital returned to a UK logistics market seeing increased occupier activity.

Ireland said the changes in industrial specialist Tritax's flagship unlisted fund reflect structural shifts in global capital flows, and he outlined to Bisnow the strategy behind repositioning a vehicle with roots stretching back two decades.

“London logistics is an easy concept for global investors to understand,” Ireland said. “It’s about supply and demand imbalance, population growth, e-commerce and last-mile logistics.”

After a slight post-Covid decline in the past few years, the UK logistics market strengthened in 2025. In Q3, availability declined for the first time in almost three years, and demand was 6% above the same period last year, Newmark data shows. The broker also reported that momentum continued in Q4.

However, Newmark cautioned against a rapid return to record lows as occupiers upgrade to newer space and release older stock. In addition, there is an increase in lease expiries five years on from the 2021-2022 Covid-era surge.

In the capital, urban logistics is dominating the sector, with last-mile and parcel delivery an increasingly important part of the market.

The London Logistics Fund was originally launched in 2005 as the Airport Industrial Property Unit Trust with a heavy concentration around Heathrow, and Tritax undertook a full strategic review after the fund transferred from previous manager Aberdeen.

Aberdeen currently owns a 60% stake in Tritax, which has about £9B of assets under management including the listed company Tritax Big Box, and that stake will rise to 80% by April 2026 and 100% by 2029.

The strategic review led to a rebranding and strategic shift in the first quarter of 2025, expanding the mandate to a London-wide logistics strategy.  

“We concluded that the airport story was still very strong, particularly at Heathrow, but we also felt there were compelling diversification and performance reasons to broaden the remit,” Ireland, who helped launch the fund in a previous role at Scottish Widows, said of widening the net around the capital.

With those structural changes completed in the first half of the year, the focus then shifted to execution, and the fund completed what Ireland described as a “sizable disposal” early in 2025 as Tritax navigated a significant redemption cycle. Toward the end of 2024, several defined benefit pension investors submitted redemption notices as they looked to reduce exposure to real estate.

While the redemptions reduced exposure from UK defined benefit schemes, they also opened the door to a different investor mix, and much of the new capital coming into the fund has been international.

“What’s happened is that the investor profile has essentially flipped. Historically, funds of this type were dominated by UK defined benefit money,” Ireland said. “We’re all aware that defined benefit schemes are steadily reducing their allocation to risk assets, including real estate.”

As a result, around 65% of the fund’s capital now comes from non-UK investors, with strong representation from Europe, Asia Pacific and the U.S., and Ireland anticipates that proportion could soon rise as high as 70%.

“Global capital is just that: global,” Ireland said, adding that international capital is increasingly comfortable underwriting London exposure, particularly in sectors where fundamentals remain robust. “We’re very conscious of where capital is flowing, and logistics in London resonates strongly.”

A fund-raise of around £203M was completed in November, with another circa £150M anticipated in Q1 amid the reprofiled investor base.

Trixtax’s gearing level has been kept quite low, at around 20% in its core-plus strategy, with a maximum set at 35%. Ireland said he expects that over the next 12 months, as the fund grows, Tritax will increase gearing closer to 30% loan-to-value.

Last year's acquisitions included a multilet estate around Heathrow, which Ireland said fits very well with Tritax's conviction around urban logistics and supply-constrained locations.

More recently, the fund acquired PR1, a single-asset logistics building in Park Royal, west London, tapping into the same theme. 

Looking ahead to 2026, the priority remains disciplined deployment while maintaining the fund’s focus on modern assets in constrained urban locations, and a new acquisition is anticipated early in 2026.

“We’re not chasing volume for the sake of it. It’s about selectively growing the portfolio where we see long-term occupational demand, strong rental growth prospects and defensible locations,” Ireland said.

Tritax is looking at multitenant industrial sites in cluster locations, mid-boxes and last-mile logistics, noting that many of the larger warehouses in the M25 orbital motorway are migrating farther out of London for better affordability.

The company is on-site with a prelet of 115K SF in Hoyle, a 122K SF development project that will be prelet, and a planning application for a 475K SF scheme in Hounslow. That should be determined in Q1 and will be largely speculatively developed, but with some level of prelet before commencement.

“Having multitenant assets increases our ability to move tenants around, to drive rent forward,” Ireland said. “London’s not one homogeneous market but individual submarkets. And they're actually more polarised [than] at any point than I can remember.”