E-tailers hunt space in the Midlands

By Liza Helps property Editor Logistics Matters

Earlier this Autumn M&S was widely reported to have a 1 million ft2 requirement to serve its online function and now news from property analyst Co Star points to Amazon looking to strike a deal for a 1 million ft2 facility in Kettering.

Internet sales as a percentage of total retail sales reached 26.5% in October this year according to official data from the ONS rising from 25.6% from the year previously and according to Statista, online retail penetration is set to pass 30% in the UK by 2028.

The recent doubling down of  government  on its 1.5 million homes by 2029 will also drive the need for warehousing to serve those homes. Research in 2019 when online penetration was just 19% noted that for every  home in the UK there is a requirement of 69 ft2 of warehousing  needed to support it. Internet sales as a percentage of total retail sales has increased nearly 40% since then and a corresponding  warehouse requirement per household  would now be 96.6 ft2 per household. That being true in the next five years  just to serve the needs of the 1.5 million homes being built there would need to be an extra 145 million ft2 of new warehouse space – some 29 million ft2 a year.

Current research puts the development of speculative warehousing to be delivered in 2025 at less than 12 million ft2.

It should be noted that Amazon has live requirements  nationwide for new Grade A warehousing space with it looking for units of around 500,000 ft2 in Yorkshire and the Southwest to name but two.

Schemes in Kettering that could accommodate a 1 million ft2 facility include Tritax Big Box’s Unit 4 at Symmetry Park Kettering, which in the proposed masterplan sees a cross dock unit of some 1.1 million ft2 with 120 dock and 16 level access doors as well as parking for 910 cars and 270 HGVs on a 46.29 acre plot. Joint letting agenst are BNP, Cushman and Wakefield, and DTRE.