Warehouse leases and property investment hit record highs in Europe last year amid the continued growth of e-commerce.
Property broker CBRE said that warehouse space leased in the region climbed from 205 million square feet in 2015 to 230 million square feet last year, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Investments in industrial and logistics properties, meanwhile, increased from $25 billion to some $27 billion during that span.
The report attributed the bulk of the trend to Amazon, which accounted nearly one-fourth of all leased warehouse space in the U.K. last year according to Savills, another property broker.
U.K. real estate investor LondonMetric said that it leased additional space to Amazon last week, and the company recently announced plans for new warehouses in Germany, France, Poland and Slovakia.
The growth of e-commerce is stressing Amazon's warehouse capacity worldwide despite its rapid increase in distribution centers — particularly in urban areas as the e-retailer aims to deliver items quickly and at lower costs.
“E-commerce is forcing investors to look at logistics and warehousing completely differently,” LondonMetric chief executive Andrew Jones told the Journal.
