Published: June 2026
A rent comparable gives you one number: what someone paid for a building nearby. It says nothing about whether that tenant was the best fit for that building - or the only one willing to sign.
Site variables ask a different question. Not what did someone pay, but what would the right tenant pay? And what would the wrong tenant pay? The gap between those two answers - for the same building - routinely exceeds 30%. That gap is the analytical blind spot at the centre of most logistics real estate due diligence today.
We made the investment case for that gap in The 30% rent gap. This piece is about the mechanism underneath it: the site variables themselves, and why they reveal what a comparable cannot.
Why comparables flatten what variables make visible
Comparable transactions record a price agreed between a landlord and whoever was in the market at that moment. They reflect demand from tenants who showed up - not the full range of tenants the building could have attracted, and not the ceiling of what the right tenant would have paid.
A logistics building that transacted at €68/sqm/year because it let to a regional 3PL may command €85/sqm from a parcel carrier that needs exactly that motorway junction and exactly that column grid. Both prices are real. The comparable records one of them. Site variable analysis surfaces both - and explains why they diverge.
"Comparables are a record of history. They tell you what the market cleared at. Variables tell you where the ceiling actually is - and that ceiling is tenant-specific, not market-average."
- Raimund Paetzmann, Occupier-Side Strategist, Logivalue
Four categories - four things comparables cannot see
Logivalue's site scoring framework evaluates each property against 42 variables spanning four categories. Each category surfaces a dimension of value that comparable analysis treats as noise.
Two buildings on the same ring road can have radically different location values depending on the tenant type. A parcel carrier evaluates a site by population density within 30-50 km and the number of delivery stops per route it can sustain. A cross-dock operator is indifferent to population and cares only about the interchange angle and inbound truck access. A pharmaceutical distributor weights proximity to hospitals and controlled-environment infrastructure. "Well-located" is not a property attribute. It is a relationship between a site and an operation. Comparables cannot capture this because they record the price paid by whoever leased - not the range of prices available to different tenant types.
Clear height is the most quoted specification metric in logistics real estate. It is also one of the most misread. A 12-metre clear height adds significant value to a robotised e-commerce fulfilment operator deploying high-bay AutoStore or shuttle systems - and adds essentially zero value to a heavy-goods 3PL stacking pallets four-high. The same is true of dock door ratios, floor load ratings, column grids, and energy supply capacity. Each variable matters enormously to specific use cases and barely registers for others. A comparable recorded from a 3PL lease tells you nothing about what a food-and-beverage e-commerce operator would pay for the same building.
Logistics real estate is not a destination. It is an input into an operation. Transport costs represent roughly 58% of total logistics costs (Armstrong & Associates / Rodrigue, The Geography of Transport Systems), which means that a tenant's willingness to pay rent is directly shaped by how much the building's location and configuration saves or costs them elsewhere in their supply chain. A building with a shallow yard that forces trailer reshuffling adds 20-40 minutes of driver time per shift. A building with insufficient power supply caps automation investment. These are not spec items - they are operational cost multipliers. The tenant who can run their operation efficiently in a building will always pay more than a tenant who cannot.
Labour availability, wage levels, and planning flexibility are not building attributes. They are market conditions that constrain which tenants can operate from a given location at all. A last-mile hub operator needs a large pool of van drivers within commuting distance and a local authority willing to accommodate high vehicle movements. A cold chain operator needs a biogas or green energy supply for compressor loads. These constraints are invisible in a comparable but decisive in site selection. A building in a tight labour market may be systematically undervalued if comparables are drawn from leases signed before the labour constraint tightened - and systematically overvalued for the tenant types most exposed to it.
What the 30% gap means in euros
The spread in achievable rent between the best-fit and worst-fit tenant type for a single building routinely exceeds 30% in Logivalue's analysis. On a 20,000 sqm building at a mid-market headline rent of €75/sqm/year, that spread is €450,000 per year in rent - a difference of roughly €6-7 million in asset value at typical European logistics cap rates.
This is not a marginal sensitivity. It is a core underwriting question. The investor who buys assuming a 3PL tenant and then lets to a parcel carrier at €95/sqm has captured that upside. The investor who buys assuming a parcel carrier and then lets to a 3PL at €65/sqm has written off years of return.
"The question is never just 'what is this building worth?' It is 'worth it to whom?' Investors who can answer the second question buy better assets and underwrite better returns. Those who settle for the first are averaging across tenants they've never met."
- Carl-Friedrich zu Knyphausen, Managing Director, Logivalue
How to use variables in a real acquisition
The practical implication is a different due diligence sequence. Instead of asking "what are comparable buildings renting for?" as the first step, the investor asks "which tenant types would extract the most operational value from this specific building?" - and then derives rent from the answer.
This means running the 42-variable assessment early, before the financial model is locked. The site scoring output identifies the strongest tenant fit categories. The supply chain cost simulation then models what each of those tenant types would actually pay - not as a market average, but as a function of what the building saves or costs them operationally.
The result is a rent forecast grounded in what tenants need, not in what others paid. It is a forward-looking model, not a rearview mirror.
Run the variable analysis on your pipeline assets
We evaluate your specific properties against 42 site variables and 65 use-case profiles, then model the rent ceiling for the highest-value tenant categories. Book a 20-minute briefing to see the output format.
Request a briefing →Sources
- Armstrong & Associates / J.-P. Rodrigue - The Geography of Transport Systems, transport cost structure in logistics (58% transport share). transportgeography.org
- CBRE - European Logistics Occupier Survey 2025: location quality and labour availability rank as the top two site selection criteria for European logistics occupiers.
- Savills - European Logistics Spotlight 2025: prime logistics rents range from €65 to €130/sqm/year across comparable European markets, reflecting how much tenant-type and spec alignment drive achievable rent above market average.