The warehouse of the future is not a cost center: it’s a strategic weapon. For logistics real estate investors, accessibility, grid capacity, and permitting flexibility now determine asset value more than proximity to a motorway exit.
A recent JLL analysis of the Dutch logistics real estate market states that the market is at a turning point. Transport costs have surged dramatically; diesel prices jumped 45% in just three months to a record €2.82 per liter, adding over €5.5 million in daily sector costs. A new truck toll launching in July 2026 will push per-kilometer costs up a further ~19% by early 2027.
Scaling up and consolidation are increasingly strategic necessities for logistics companies to remain competitive, according to CBRE. This has direct implications for logistics real estate. The location requirements of distribution centers are shifting, while at the same time, the demands for scale, quality, and technological fit-out are rising; mutually reinforcing trends that are accelerating this transition.
Combined with rising rental prices and increasing transport costs, this creates a cost structure that puts growing pressure on the competitive position of the Netherlands as a location for cost-sensitive, large-scale distribution.
These pressures are accelerating a structural shift toward multimodal transport. Rail and inland waterway connections are becoming genuine location requirements rather than optional extras.
The Changing Role of European Distribution Centers: A Decade of Transformation
The European distribution center (DC), as we know, is a vast, single-tenant shed sitting beside a motorway interchange, optimized for one company’s private logistics network. This DC is facing an identity crisis.
Over the next ten years, a convergence of supply chain restructuring, sustainability pressure, new transport economics, and the emerging architecture of the Physical Internet will fundamentally redefine what a DC is for, where it sits, and who it serves.
From Private Nodes to Shared Hubs
The dominant model of logistics real estate for the past three decades was built on private networks: one shipper, one DC, one dedicated flow. Inefficiency is built into virtually every step of current processes, from empty trucks deadheading to pick up their next loads to vast distribution centers that sit idle for days or weeks on end. That model is becoming economically unsustainable.
The Physical Internet offers a different architecture. In existing logistics systems, most warehouses and distribution centers are used by just one or a few actors in a private network. The Physical Internet inverts this: distribution centers navigate π-container flows into and out of the network.
The Physical Internet envisions the development of logistics nodes into Physical Internet nodes, in which operations are standardized and a family of standard, interoperable modular load units (ranging from maritime containers to smaller boxes) is widely used. Services in PI nodes are visible and digitally accessible, including planning, booking, and execution operations.
The EU plans to build a complete logistics network for the Physical Internet by 2040. Advanced pilot implementations are expected to be well-functioning by 2030, contributing to at least a 30% reduction in congestion, emissions, and energy consumption, while improving resilience and adaptability.
Well before full implementation, the directional pull of the Physical Internet is already reshaping how DCs are designed and operated. The facility of 2035 will be a node in a shared network, not a castle with a moat
Nearshoring Rewrites the Location Map
The biggest structural force reshaping the DC network is the geographic reconfiguration of European supply chains themselves. After decades of offshoring to low-cost Asian manufacturing bases, companies are systematically shortening and regionalizing their chains.
Maersk’s 2024 European Business Resilience survey found that more than half of businesses are considering new sourcing locations, and almost one third of those new locations are in or near Europe, in countries such as Türkiye, Egypt, Poland, Morocco, and Romania. The emerging pattern is increasingly described as “in Europe for Europe.”
Reindustrialization has entered a more mature, disciplined phase. Nearly three-quarters of large European and US organizations now engage in reshoring, and 86% prioritize market access and supply chain resilience in their decisions. AI becomes a core enabler of reindustrialization execution, with 87% of organizations planning to invest in AI and advanced manufacturing technologies.
This reshoring wave has direct consequences for DC location logic. When manufacturing moves closer to European consumers, the traditional gateway DC model (massive facilities in the Netherlands or Belgium capturing Asian imports) gives way to a more distributed network of mid-sized facilities positioned near new production clusters in Eastern and Southern Europe, serving regional rather than continental catchment areas.
The European Commission’s Circular Economy Action Plan targets a doubling of circular material use by 2035, creating systemic demand for reverse logistics infrastructure and closed-loop coordination. Facilities will need to handle returns and remanufacturing flows alongside inbound distribution; a fundamentally different operational profile from today’s one-directional DCs.
The End of the Mega-DC Era?
Evidence from transaction data already supports a structural shift in preferred DC size. The era of the speculative mega-DC facilities built on cheap peripheral land is giving way to a preference for strategically located mid-sized assets.
Demand is fragmenting into multiple regional distribution points rather than concentrating at a single national hub per country. This reflects a deliberate choice by users: shorter, more resilient chains with built-in redundancy, rather than single points of failure optimized purely for cost at scale.
The logic of the Physical Internet reinforces this. With the physical internet, goods storage would be decentralized, enabling faster shipments. ‘You can possibly get much closer to on-demand deliveries,’ according to researchers. Cost savings for consumers are likely to result from a more efficient service. Decentralized storage means more, smaller, smarter nodes; not fewer, larger ones
Multimodality Becomes a Prerequisite
The economics of transport are shifting in ways that make modal connectivity a hard location requirement rather than a nice-to-have. Rising fuel costs, the introduction of road freight tolling across European member states, and the EU’s CO₂ mandates for heavy-duty vehicles targeting 45% emission reduction by 2030, 65% by 2035, and 90% by 2040 are structurally elevating the cost of road-only logistics. Inland waterway and rail alternatives become increasingly competitive.
This reprices the location hierarchy. A DC adjacent to a rail terminal or inland port is no longer merely differentiated. It becomes the operationally preferred choice. The Physical Internet explicitly builds on this multi-modal logic: just as the digital net can use and move between modes such as copper cable, fiber, and satellite, so too can the Physical Internet use road, rail, inland waterways, air, and so on.
DCs without multimodal access will face a structural disadvantage as these transport economics bite harder through the decade.
Automation and Energy as Facility Differentiators
The internal character of distribution centers is changing as profoundly as their location. Autonomous heavy-duty trucking could reach deployment across the US, Europe, and China, with commercial deployments already underway. Inside the facility, automation (robotics, autonomous vehicles, AI-driven warehouse management) is moving from a competitive advantage to a baseline requirement, partly because European labor markets remain among the most expensive globally.
Energy becomes a facility-level strategic asset. The electrification of the truck fleet means a modern DC needs to be both a charging and a storage hub. Facilities with sufficient grid connection capacity and physical space for charging infrastructure gain a structural edge. Where grid congestion constrains new connections (a growing reality in large parts of Western Europe), existing assets with capacity are effectively irreplaceable.
The DC of 2035
Synthesizing these forces, the DC of 2035 looks meaningfully different from its 2025 counterpart. It is smaller on average but smarter, automated, real-time-monitored, and digitally integrated into shared logistics networks. It is multi-tenant, or at least multi-user, with standardized interfaces that allow goods from different shippers to flow through the same physical infrastructure. Idle warehouse and terminal capacity, as well as transportation slots, are opened to other companies through digital services and standard procedures.
It sits at a multimodal junction (near water, rail, or both) rather than simply at a motorway interchange. It handles reverse flows and circular economy returns alongside inbound distribution. It is energy self-sufficient where possible, with on-site solar and battery storage reducing dependence on a congested grid. And it operates not as a private fiefdom within one company’s supply chain, but as a node in a shared European logistics network, closer in spirit to a postal sorting center than a traditional private warehouse.
Implications for Investors and Operators
Secular trends like the rise of AI, the green transition, and geopolitical fragmentation are exacerbating vulnerabilities in EU industrial supply chains. Defense and civilian infrastructure investment are increasingly linked, driving investments in dual-use projects such as transport and grid enhancements.
For investors in logistics real estate, this decade-long transition carries a clear message. Assets that combine multimodal access, power capacity, and permitting flexibility are becoming genuinely scarce and, therefore, structurally valuable. Assets that lack these qualities but were built speculatively on cheap peripheral land face progressive obsolescence as users migrate toward the connected, energy-capable, modular node that the Physical Internet era demands.
The question is no longer how large the shed is, but how well connected it is to transport networks, the grid, and the open digital infrastructure of the logistics system of the future.
Walther Ploos van Amstel.