Rising labor costs, a new truck toll, and energy volatility are forcing Dutch logistics managers to fundamentally rethink their approach to real estate. The message from the latest market data is unambiguous: the warehouse you choose today will define your competitive position for the next decade.
The logistics sector has always operated on tight margins. Efficiency gains — shaving seconds off pick cycles, optimizing truck fill rates, reducing dwell time at docks — are the lifeblood of the business. But the cost environment of 2026 is different in kind, not just degree. Labor costs have risen structurally. Energy prices are volatile and elevated. And from 1 July 2026, the new truck toll will increase per-kilometer costs by up to 9.8% for certain operators.
When you add wage indexation, the phasing out of fuel duty rebates, and the upcoming EU ETS-2 carbon pricing extension to road transport from 2027, the cumulative cost increase per driven kilometer between early 2026 and early 2027 could reach approximately 19%. That is not a market cycle. That is a structural reset.
For logistics managers considering their next facility decision, the implication is clear: the building and its location are no longer a hygiene factor. They are a lever for controlling costs across the entire chain.
From Cost Line to Chain Efficiency
Here is a number worth pausing on: in 2025, rent and service charges typically represent just 5 to 10% of total logistics operating costs. That share is shrinking further as labor, transport, and sustainability investment costs rise rapidly. Which means that spending more on a better-located, better-specified building — one that enables automation, reduces transport kilometers, and supports workforce retention — can generate savings that far exceed its incremental rental cost.
This is the shift that CBRE’s research clearly identifies: logistics real estate is moving from a cost item to a strategic instrument. The managers who grasp this first will have a structural advantage over those still optimizing purely on headline rent per square meter.
Scale Is Not Optional — It Is the Strategy
The data on consolidation is striking. Approximately 80% of relocation decisions in the logistics sector are now driven by quality improvement rather than simple space expansion. Businesses are not just moving because they have run out of room. They are moving because their current building can no longer support the operation they need to run.
Automation is the primary driver here. Automated Guided Vehicles, shuttle systems, and mezzanine installations only generate a return on investment at sufficient scale and in buildings designed to support them — flat floors to DIN standards, clear heights above 12 meters, floor load capacity of at least 5,000 kg/m², adequate power capacity for charging infrastructure. A building that cannot accommodate these requirements is not just suboptimal. In a market where 67% of logistics managers cite cost reduction as their top priority, it is a competitive liability.
The trend toward logistics campuses — large-scale, highly specified facilities consolidating multiple flows — is accelerating for precisely this reason. DSV Logistics Park Moerdijk, now the largest distribution center by volume in the Benelux at nearly 2.5 million m³, is the clearest expression of this logic. Scale spreads fixed costs across more volume, lowers cost per order, and creates the conditions in which technology investments actually pay off.
Location Is the New Motorway Junction
The truck toll changes the location calculus. Previously, a site’s value was largely determined by its proximity to the motorway network. Going forward, proximity to multimodal infrastructure — inland terminals, rail connections, waterway access — becomes a hard requirement for any operation seeking to control transport costs over the long term.
The national target that 50% of containers leaving Rotterdam should travel by train or ship by 2035 is not aspirational. It is the direction of policy, investment, and economics simultaneously. Logistics managers planning facilities with 10 to 15-year lease commitments need to factor in where transport costs will be, not where they are today.
Beyond transport, two further location factors are hardening into non-negotiables. Grid capacity — the ability to connect sufficient power for EV charging and automated systems — is constrained across large parts of the Netherlands. And workforce proximity, combined with adequate housing for labour migrants (350,000 to 400,000 of whom work in Dutch logistics), is increasingly a planning prerequisite for new development approvals.
The Quality Gap Is the Opportunity
Approximately half of the existing Dutch logistics stock predates the Global Financial Crisis and no longer meets current operational standards. Vacancy in modern, well-located assets in established Dutch logistics hotspots — Bleiswijk-Waddinxveen, Tilburg-Waalwijk, Eindhoven, Venlo-Venray, Rotterdam — sits between 0 and 3%. Vacancy in pre-1980 stock within the same clusters exceeds 8%.
This is the market signal: quality is scarce where it matters. For logistics managers, the practical conclusion is that waiting for the perfect moment to upgrade your facility is increasingly a false economy. Every year spent in an underspecified building is a year of higher labor costs, constrained automation potential, and growing exposure to inflation in transport costs.
The warehouse of the future is not larger for its own sake. It is larger because scale enables technology, technology reduces cost per unit, and lower cost per unit is the only sustainable competitive advantage in a sector where margins leave no room for structural inefficiency.
The managers who understand that distinction — and act on it — are the ones who will still be operating profitably when the next cost shock arrives.
Source: CBRE