Mapping the UK Warehousing Market

When we started Stowga one of the first things we did was set about mapping the market. We needed to size both the supply (the warehouses) and the demand (businesses who store goods). We thought it would be an easy job to map the supply - surely a quick Google search would bring up a list of different websites that would tell us how many warehouses there are in the UK?

We were very wrong….there wasn’t one. Not one place we could find this information.

So we rang every major player - all the big industrial agents, the industrial real estate funds big and small, the research houses, the membership bodies - no one could tell us how many warehouses there were in the UK. That information, we were told, simply didn’t exist in any coherent format. The problem is agents only research areas they can make fees on. Funds only know about their chosen field (big box, development, etc). Membership bodies only know who their members are.

So we thought we’d get the lists off everyone and build it ourselves.

The bulk of the information required to build that database is held by the government (for legal and tax reasons). It’s a huge amount of information held between the Valuations Office and the Land Registry, and it was our job to gather, clean and make sense of the data.

The Land Registry breaks out every property in the UK by it’s title number, and the Valuations Office classify the type. There are 14 different classifications for industrial, and after extracting the data and cleaning it that gave us a total of 184,928 industrial properties in the UK.

We then geocoded every site to visualise the distribution. The level of detail we went to is down to street level, but at a high level it looks like the image on the header which we built in Mapbox or this hexagonal format one below built in Carto.

So there we are - every industrial property in the UK mapped!

You'll notice major cities and infrastructure points - ports, airports, motorways, stick out. If you want to find out more about those sites look at our locations page. If you want to take a look at the detailed map look here. Each site has been geotagged as a red dot but you will notice as you zoom in the spots disappear….we’ve set a restriction on the zoom level to fade them out as that’s our IP. If you want to talk about buying the data, get in touch - but you’d better have deep pockets!

It’s 2.1 billion square foot but we focused in on just over 4,000 sites suitable for our marketplace. Here are the highlights:

• Rents range from £20 per square foot in Central London to £2.60 in Carlisle. Nationally, the average rent is £6.50.
• Yields range from 10% in Sterling for a mid-quality shed to 4.5% for a prime site in West London. The average prime yield at the time was 6.4%, the average nationally was 7.2%.
• Price per pallet ranges from £5 in Heathrow to £1 in Pontypool. The average across the country is £1.85 per pallet per week. Outdoor it’s £0.50 per pallet.

These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. We think the work we’ve done is the most comprehensive survey of the UK warehouse market to have ever been done. But we’re just scratching the surface....the really interesting part is what's coming next: the demand - where and what. If you are an industrial property developer that data is gold dust.

If you would like further information please do not hesitate to contact us - we’d love to hear from you. Visit us by clicking here:

hello@stowga.com 0203 327 4762