March 03, 2026 | David Hatcher
CIC and Blackstone-backed warehouse firm’s CEO lays out plans for the next stage of the cycle
The build-up and sale of Logicor was one of the biggest stories of the European real estate market in the previous decade. In the early evolution of online retailing, Blackstone created a warehouse platform to capture that emerging demand and sold it to China Investment Corporation for €12.25bn in 2017 in what was then the largest real estate deal the region had ever seen.
For a few years, even with Blackstone maintaining its role as manager of the business and buying back a 10% stake through its core strategy, Logicor seemed to take a pause as it consolidated under its new ownership.
But following the appointment of Michael Slattery as permanent chief executive in 2020, who had also helped steer the ship in his previous role as a board member and a managing director at Blackstone, the business has become increasingly purposeful.
In practice that has meant beginning to recycle capital from its portfolio, standing on its own two feet to fund its development pipeline and generate returns. That process has been building up through Slattery’s reign and last year it offloaded €704m of assets as the market began to recover – almost double that of the previous year. Those sales were predominantly made up of single-country portfolio disposals, including a £245m collection of eight UK assets bought by Greykite.
Last week the company reported its results for 2025, which included increased rental growth of 3.7%, adjusted EBITDA of €580m (a fall of 6% partly in line with a 3% shrinkage in its size of its portfolio to €15.1bn) and a slight dip in occupancy by 2.5 percentage points to 91.5%.
Green Street News caught up with Slattery to discuss planned sales for the year ahead, refinancing €1.5bn of debt and the views of its Chinese majority owner.
How has the business performed over the past year?
The key measure for us is like-for-like rental growth, which stood at 3.7% [3% in 2024]. That is giving us a lot of confidence, which is all about capture of reversion. If you dig a little deeper, you’ll see our releasing spread stood at 25% which is an excellent outcome. That gives us confidence that our strategy is delivering the right results, which is excellent asset management combined with growing our presence in our high conviction markets.
Occupancy did slightly dip towards the end of last year [91.5%, down from 94%], which was a result of scheduled move-outs and the delivery of some newer product and that will allow us to capture further reversion.
You sold €704m of assets during the year, with the company’s overall portfolio reducing from €15.6bn to €15.1bn as a result. There seems to have been an acceleration in disposals – why is that?
What you’re seeing is a capital recycling strategy, a program that is ongoing. And that program involves us selling, disposing, liberating the capital effectively from assets, which we don’t think are strategic any more and reinvesting that capital into higher-conviction, higher-return markets.
“In-country deals are nice and straightforward from a financing point of view but I think we will see more larger cross-border portfolio deals this year too”
With lower-yielding, lower-growth prospects it’s obviously pretty important to take our capital and invest it in the highest return opportunities. It’s not that we are exiting any geographies per se but we’re in 16 countries and our key markets are the UK, France and Germany.
Was the decision made in any way to return capital back to shareholders?
No, not at all. We do have a steady dividend that we deliver but because we’re not publicly listed it isn’t a hard requirement in that sense.
How tough have you found the investment market over the past year and how do you see trading conditions in the year ahead?
We found investor appetite to be robust last year. Our sweet spot was slightly smaller deals by historical measures of under €250m in predominantly single-country deals.
Investors are coming into the sector because they like the fundamentals and we’ve had a dramatic improvement in financing conditions over the last 12 to 18 months and that looks set to continue. In-country deals are nice and straightforward from a financing point of view but I think we will see more larger cross-border portfolio deals this year too.
Do you have a disposal target for the year ahead?
We don’t have a hard target but it could be a similar number to last year. Because this is an ongoing programme it’s dependent on the readiness of our assets for sale and the investment market.
How will the capital be recycled?
We delivered close to 350,000 sq m last year. We’ve got a really good number under construction, nearly that number again, and a strong pipeline.
It’s a mix [of ground up development, repositioning and refurbishment]. We do have some older assets that are superbly located, and there is a great opportunity for us to invest in those.
You have over €1.5bn of debt to repay this year. Will you need to undertake disposals to help fund that?
Our LTV has been tracking downwards [48.1% down from 49.3%]. We prudently manage our balance sheet and we have a great unsecured corporate bond programme with staggered maturities, which allows us to manage how we go to market.
We have a €15bn portfolio and have staggered maturities and a sort of constant rolling programme. We could use sales to repay debt but we don’t have to. We have available liquidity to do it without.
How did you find the occupational market last year?
We did see some tariff and macroeconomic uncertainty last year, which affected occupier decision-making and made it slightly softer, although we feel existing leasing and renewals are pretty strong. That’s the flip side. What we’re seeing now is enquiries are really strong, so it feels like there’s a release of pent-up demand, that decision making was delayed but it wasn’t cancelled.
From what areas are you seeing demand come from?
From 3PLs, with grey space seeming to have been absorbed in many markets, particularly the Netherlands and other highly distribution-led markets.
Defence is obviously a consideration – everyone’s talking about it because of the fiscal expansion in Germany, which may lead to other countries to do the same thing. I don’t think it’s hit real estate yet, or at least not for us, but if it takes up supply somewhere else, then that is still going to be beneficial for the market as a whole.
You have the classic e-commerce penetration and supply chain modernisation is something we’re seeing as well. Pharma and food are still really strong in terms of enquiries and in our business and Chinese customers are a relatively small but rapidly growing part of our business too.
What direction do you get from CIC and what is its view on the market and Logicor more broadly?
They are big believers in the European logistics market. They’re long-term investors in Logicor. They’re experienced, they understand what we’re doing and are very supportive of our strategy. There are certainly no plans to sell or change their ownership as far as I’m aware.