Q4 Warehouse Capacity: Ready for Peak?

Every year, the same conversation happens in the same week of September. Someone runs the numbers on inbound volume against available pallet positions, and the answer comes back tighter than expected. Then the scramble starts.

The difference this year is that the market has less slack in it than it did twelve months ago, and the buffer that used to absorb a late decision is thinning out.

If your Q4 capacity plan is still a draft, this is the moment to close it.

The Market Is Tightening, Slowly and Then Not

European logistics take-up has been recovering steadily. Through 2025, quarterly take-up stabilised at between 5 and 6 million square metres, still below the 9.6 million square metre peak recorded in Q4 2021, but a clear improvement on a difficult 2024. Forecasts point to continued moderate growth.

The more interesting number is on the supply side. Only around 3.8% of total European logistics stock was under construction by mid-2025, and twelve-month rolling completions are expected to hit a nine-year low as the development pipeline stays muted. A growing share of what does complete is already committed before it opens.

Prologis research estimates Europe needs roughly €150 billion of new logistics space just to meet current consumption levels. The forecast is that European vacancy could fall below 5% if supply pipelines stay constrained and economic growth holds, which would make Europe one of the tightest logistics markets in the world.

None of this is a cliff. It is a slow squeeze, which is precisely why it catches people out. Nothing dramatic happens until the week you need space and there is none in the corridor you need it in.

Where the Pressure Is Concentrated

The averages hide a lot. Utilisation rates remain high in France, Germany, and the Netherlands, leaving very little room for overflow inventory when peak season volume arrives. In some Western European corridors, availability is effectively nil. Vacancy along Belgium’s Brussels to Antwerp spine stood at 2.33% at the end of 2025.

Central and Eastern Europe reads differently. Vacancy runs higher, up to around 8% in Poland and the wider CEE region, but absorption is enormously strong, driven by nearshoring from Western Europe. Poland recorded roughly 1.6 million square metres of gross take-up in Q1 2026, up around 40% year on year, with net take-up up approximately 75%. The vacancy rate sat at 7.2% against new supply of about 650,000 square metres.

That combination matters more than either figure alone. This is not a market absorbing renewals. New leases and expansions made up a significant share of activity, which means the demand has genuine depth. Czech Republic and Romania have both posted strong annual take-up growth as well.

Read together, the picture is a region with real available capacity and real competition for it.

The Constraint Nobody Planned For

There is a newer bottleneck that has moved from a technical footnote to a genuine site selection issue: electricity.

Most European electricity grids are close to or at capacity. As distribution centres become more automated and more electrified, their power requirements are outrunning the connections available to them. Securing sufficient grid capacity for a modern, automation-ready warehouse is now considered critical, and in some markets it is the constraint that determines whether a site is viable at all.

For anyone planning capacity that involves automation, refrigeration, or electric vehicle charging infrastructure, power availability needs to be on the checklist alongside floor area and dock doors. It is not a detail that gets sorted out later.

What Occupiers Are Actually Asking For

Where demand is strong, it is concentrated on a fairly specific building profile. Occupiers have consistently favoured high-specification stock: clear heights of 10 to 12 metres, strong floor loading, generous yard depth, and design that meets environmental certification requirements.

There is a reason for that beyond preference. Much of the current market activity reflects companies trading up rather than expanding, moving out of older, less efficient buildings into stock that is genuinely fit for automated, energy-intensive operations. Net absorption is not expected to fully recover until 2027, precisely because a share of new leasing is offset by space being vacated elsewhere.

The practical implication: the weakest assets are becoming more exposed, and the best assets are getting taken. If your Q4 plan depends on finding well-specified space in a strong corridor at short notice, you are competing for the smallest part of the market.

Five Questions to Answer Before October

1. What is your actual peak volume forecast, not last year’s plus a percentage? Peak planning built on the previous year’s assumptions is how overflow costs happen.
2. Where is your buffer, physically? Overflow capacity two countries away from your demand is a line item, not a solution.
3. Do you have grid capacity for what you are running? If you are adding automation or temperature control, confirm the power connection before you confirm anything else.
4. Is your contingency space contracted or just discussed? In a market where completions are hitting a nine-year low, a verbal understanding in September is worth very little in November.
5. What does next year look like? If your peak requirement is becoming structural rather than seasonal, short-term overflow arrangements are the expensive way to solve a permanent problem.

The Case for Deciding Early

The market is not in crisis. Take-up is growing moderately, vacancy in CEE remains workable, and rental growth is forecast to run at a manageable 2% or so annually through 2026 and 2027.

But the direction of travel is one way. Supply is constrained by rising construction costs, planning restrictions, and grid capacity limits, none of which resolve quickly. Nearshoring continues to anchor demand in Central and Eastern Europe as production networks diversify away from Asia. And occupier surveys suggest 47% intend to increase their footprints against just 4% planning to reduce them.

Space secured in August costs less and comes with more choice than space secured in November. That has always been true. It is simply more true in a market where the pipeline is thinning.

Need capacity in place before peak? Check availability across more than 270 locations in the CTPark Network, from the North Sea to the Black Sea.