Sarah Cooper, Global Head of Real Estate Equity Sales, and for various reasons, you have me moderating. I would welcome all of your questions as we proceed, particularly around the things that I'm not allowed to mention.
Thank you to management. We have Tim Arndt, CFO, Justin Meng, head of IR. That's all from your team, right? We don't have Abhishek. Abhishek as well, here with us. To jump right in, maybe you can give us the latest updates on leasing and tenant demand into September. Hit on what's changed since earnings and the pipeline as well, if that's okay.
Sure. Well, good morning, everybody. It's great to be here, be back in N.Y. Maybe I'll even widen out a little bit further and touch on the quarter overall and how the business is performing. In a nutshell, things are going very well. If we just begin around the operational part of the business, all of the trends that we have been talking about for really, in my view, about the last eight quarters now, but I think the market has taken more notice in the last two or three.
All those positive trends around our leasing volumes, the pace of decision making, lifting of occupancies. We've seen a couple quarters of positive market rent growth. All those things have been continuing here into the third quarter. That's been great to see. It's something that is facilitating continued growth in our value creation business.
Namely, development of logistics facilities for one part. That's an area of our deployment that had been more muted going back to, say, 2024, when conditions didn't really warrant. But with all the improved conditions and tightening that I'm describing here, that's picked up meaningfully, together with a lot of the data center opportunity, which I'm sure we'll spend a little bit of time on. That's all being fueled by two things, really. Our strategic capital business. We have nearly $70 billion of AUM, third party AUM that is, supporting all of that ownership and growth. But also our balance sheet in and of itself, where we just had an equity raise in advance of the SEGRO transaction, which is the cherry on top of all this.
A very important transaction that is still underway for us in Europe, but a highly complementary portfolio and team that we are working through its closing. That is something that is going through various regulatory processes, including a shareholder vote at the end of this month, and something we expect to close in the first half of next year. So across the board, things are going great.
Sarah, I think specifically on some more of the numbers, I think here in the third quarter, we will probably see lease signings. We have had a number of records on overall lease signings for Prologis in the last several quarters, and that has been 60, 65 million square feet. That has been the hallmark of what is a record for us in terms of signings within a quarter. I suspect we are going to see a number in that ZIP code again this third quarter.
We are not fully done, but the first few months have been great. As we really more finely parse the pipeline, we are noticing that deals in our agreement stage are accelerating. Things are moving through the system a little more quickly. But the thing that we are always appending to this indication of activity beyond the signings is just whether the pipeline itself is getting replenished with new demand after we have a record quarter of new lease signings. And that trend is continuing. We are seeing our lease pipeline stay well over 100 million square feet in new inquiries, which has been great to see.
Can I I think there is a few things to dig in on there, but one of the things Ken Caplan said this morning I think was that 15% of their logistics leasing was related to the data build-out, and I know we spoke about that at Nareit. Are you seeing about the same or more or less?
We would call it about 10% of our new leasing has been dedicated to some form of support for the data center build-out. So yeah, we think that that is a new segment of demand that is probably longer standing than some people may think. There is going to be a couple phases of it. One that will be fulfilling this new build-out. There is an ecosystem to build out. But the replenishment of these systems, the chips themselves, the hardware, the MEP, all of that is going to need repair, maintenance, replacement over time. And so there is going to be a longstanding demand addition from this segment for sure.
Okay. Did anyone else want to ask any questions relating to those opening remarks before we move on? Okay. Maybe now we can just touch on the market, U.S. net absorption deliveries, vacancy, and market rent growth as we look out to the next few quarter.
Many of you probably know we had a meaningful tick-up in net absorption, in the second quarter, 66 million square feet, I think. We hadn't seen a number that high in quite a while. I would say, for me, the net absorption numbers we had been seeing for the prior six, seven, eight quarters had been almost inexplicably low.
We would expect that a good, productive market net absorption in the U.S. should be around 225 million square feet annually, let's say. So that 66 million figure in the second quarter was in keeping with that, a little bit ahead of that. But all the quarters we had seen where we were registering some 30s, 35, low 40 number had been quite low for the level of activity we had seen from our customers.
The explanation of all that was very clearly, it was just working through the overabsorption of space that we saw early in COVID. That we saw occupancies lift very high. Customers take a little bit more space than they needed. So across 2024, parts of 2025, that had slowed down. We had been saying for a while, we thought that was running out. That customers were getting their portfolios right-sized, and we were going to see new incremental demand. I do think Prologis saw that. Empirically, I would say you can see that in our numbers ahead of the market because we had these very strong leasing volumes since the end of 2024, really, building occupancy over the majority of the course of that time, while market occupancies were actually still declining for a spell. Now they've bottomed and they are growing.
It just looks like we're a few quarters ahead of that due to where our portfolio is and its quality. These are conditions that are contributing to positive market rent growth. We're a global portfolio. We've seen positive rent growth outside the U.S. for a longer period of time, probably backing up about a year now, places like Europe and certainly LATAM. So we've benefited from that for a while. The U.S. had been slower to get to that point, but in the first two quarters now of this year, the U.S. has been a contributor to that. I'll add on, the outlook on market rent growth, we describe our business as rationally, we would say, an inflation plus on market rent growth expectations for logistics.
The plus, I would just put in a pile all the secular drivers of logistics, which e-commerce is at the top of that list, but now it's becoming other things, like advanced manufacturing, like the data center build-out. There's a number of things that add incremental demand beyond just inflation. The other component there that's lurking, that's kind of stayed wide due to the level of vacancies in the market, is replacement cost rents. I'll back up for just a moment, giving a long answer here, but we have our lease mark-to-market, which is just a measure of how much higher are market rents than the leases that we have in place, and we size that at 17%.
It's worth about $700 million, on memory, that if we do nothing else, just uplift the portfolio up to market rents as leases come due, we'll bring in that $700 million. But then there's another measure. What is the gap up to replacement cost rents? How much higher are replacement cost rents than market? That's another roughly 20%.
Sorry, another on top of the 17%, or just.
-another on top of the 17%. You compound those numbers, you're getting 38%, 39%, would be the total gap of rent to be collected. That phenomena, aside from all the inflation plus kind of theory on the case for market rent growth, closing that gap, which we've seen historically occur in real estate cycles, would put market rent growth into a mid-single digit kind of ZIP Code, I think for some years running, until that gap closes. Now, we're not here to say when that commences and at what pace it goes and how long it runs, but that's a lot of rent gap that is irrationally priced right now, and we think will need to close and we have seen close in past cycles.
Sorry, you said into mid-single digit?
Yeah.
That is low relative to the gap, unless leases.
That is an annual number. I am just saying annually. I think if you put those, pick an inflation number, and we all have our guesses now where it is, and then a plus on top of that from the secular drivers, I think that puts you to four or five. Pick a number. We are just saying that you also, on top of that, this replacement cost rent gap in economics shouldn't exist for a long period of time, and it kind of depends on how quickly the markets tighten from here as to how quickly market rents will rise to close that gap.
Okay.
Maybe to your point, Sarah, maybe mid-single digits is conservative. It could certainly be higher.
Maybe we can hit on where you're seeing the strongest and the weakest markets at the moment, and talk about SoCal.
The strongest markets are on a spot measurement, I would say. How well are markets occupied? How good has their market rent growth been recently? That remains Sun Belt kind of markets, Southeast U.S. Texas remains strong. I would say some of our central U.S. markets have been surprisingly good for a long period now. Indianapolis, Columbus, Memphis. We are definitely seeing signs of that rotating back out to the coasts. You mentioned SoCal. SoCal, we would say is definitely inflecting. It's a quarter or two behind the U.S. But for our holdings, which we have a lot of the Inland Empire, a lot of our holdings are in Inland Empire West or modern product in the South Bay. All that product is doing quite well. We're very highly occupied in SoCal. We're over 96% occupied there, s trong rent growth.
I say all that to have folks kind of zoom out, at least on our experience in SoCal, that it has been pretty good, frankly, for all of the discussion we've had over the last three years. Our portfolio has actually performed quite well. New supply is limited there, as you all know, and they are benefiting from some of the growth we've seen in advanced manufacturing, defense, et cetera. Weak markets, if I go to that part, Seattle's still a little bit behind in the U.S. Central Pennsylvania is still a little bit behind where we would like to see it, but think they will catch up. And then globally, China is working through its excess vacancy.
Should we still go there?
Less than 1% of our portfolio is in China.
Can I ask your views on the European market and your new SEGRO acquisition?
Europe has been a bright spot, I would say. I will come back to SEGRO in just a moment. But beyond SEGRO, I think Europe is an underappreciated stabilizer of our portfolio. It has very strong and steady operations. It did not have the large oscillation in rents and vacancies that the U.S. experienced, so its normalization post-COVID was less extreme. As I mentioned, its occupancy stayed high. It began producing positive market rent growth sooner than markets in the U.S. did. We love the markets there. SEGRO brings this opportunity to combine a portfolio that we have admired for decades, literally. We have known that portfolio and that company for a long time. We have tremendous respect for the company and what they have built.
Got to know their team here, in the process so far, and really look forward to combining both our platforms and our portfolios, which are very complementary across these markets. We have 100% overlap in terms of markets that we exist. Prologis is in some markets that SEGRO is not, but not the other way around. But the product offerings are quite different, and the complementary state of that is going to be fantastic.
Have you felt that spending in Europe is also defensive, but also summer has decreased impact?
Sorry, just the question was, have you seen the impact of the defense spending and the impact of the de minimis rule on the 3PLs?
The answer is yes on both fronts, and this is in Europe. And it's hard to draw a direct line between defense spending and uses within our buildings, but just the nature of space that is being taken up across Europe, there has been increased spending as we've seen, and I guess as you look at the state of the world, the potential for that to increase more is certainly lurking. And then, yes, look, the change of the de minimis ruling here in the U.S. and just of trade and tariff patterns generally, including not only Europe and China, but Canada and other places, we're seeing benefit our global portfolio indeed.
Maybe we can move on to the development side of things. It's been a pretty active year, particularly for build-to-suit customers. Can you talk about what you see as driving that, and if the momentum is sustainable, where it goes from here?
I would start by saying, to understand the build-to-suit business, our product may seem like a commodity, and in some ways it is, but it is definitely not homogeneous amongst the sub-market the product is in. If it is institutional or grade A quality, you need a particular size or shape of building, certain functionality, clear height. I think a belief that a customer can come in and just find a warehouse, particularly for a more sophisticated global customer of ours, it is often not the case, and needing to build something becomes a solution that they pursue.
Prologis having 14,000 acres of land under our ownership or control that we worked very hard through some slower years post-COVID to get pad ready and entitled everywhere that we could, together with a very strong customer franchise, bringing those things together for the build-to-suit opportunities is a winning strategy. We have been at the center of that for the last six, seven quarters, I would say. Last year, we had a real incredible start in the first six months of last year, in particular on build-to-suits, and that success has continued. There has been a lot of need for larger boxes, as many of you probably know, and those are a little bit harder to come by, and that has been a particular kind of subset of the build-to-suit business strength.
Sustainable?
At this level Yeah, I think so. Look, we have had on any year of starts, our average build-to-suit volume has been about 35% of our development starts, and we would expect essentially the same number going forward.
Thank you. T ransaction markets. What are you seeing buyer appetite, sellers, cap rates, pricing right now?
The transaction markets have been strong, good. Larger, or maybe I should call them mid-size portfolios, trading. A lot of focus on where the lease mark-to-market and near term rental growth is coming from. It's particular slices that carry the most strength. But we would say high quality portfolios still trading low fives on market rents, roughly low to mid sevens on IRRs. Now it's acknowledged that the 10 year's been moving a little bit. I don't know if you noticed that, Sarah Cooper.
We will see how that plays out into values. I think in the short term, that could have some effect on discount rates and IRRs in pricing. I think over the longer term, what rates are doing pinned really by what's going on inflation. Inflation will move rents and values in the longer run.
That's why we invest in real estate, many of us. It's a very good inflation hedge. But in the short term, this rate move could affect pricing. We'll see, but I think that if that were to occur, values would be on the rise sometime thereafter.
I don't know if you heard it this morning, and obviously he's positioned his logistics as his largest asset class. But Ken Caplan this morning was saying that now's the time to lean into real estate, inflation hedge, hard asset, low obsolescence.
I am very glad to hear that. I had not heard that. I think it is a very underappreciated sort of talking point right now in this environment, especially when you see the way REIT stocks have performed in the last two weeks. I think in our business in particular, where you need something like 15acres-20 acres of land to bring one of our facilities, the thing I would attach to that statement is their obsolescence. They are not making any more land. There is no more places to put this stuff, and it all wants to be closer into consumers.
Were you a CFO when rates used to be much, much higher? Any lessons from-
in terms of how to?
-well, I have been in real estate finance since the mid-1990s, so I have see a number of rate environments at this point. I've always been involved in hedging and addressing the financing of real estate. Yes. I don't know if there's another question lurking there, but doing my best to manage it through this environment.
Okay. Can we move on to data centers?
Yes.
Or actually, no, can we just one more just on transactions, aside from the big one that I can't ask about, global expansion and there's different things happening in other parts of the world, maybe more stress elsewhere. Any ambitions? I know you have the fabulous Claire Cormier Thielke out doing things as well.
Claire getting a special shout-out. No, look, we are always looking at any kind of acquisition opportunity, individual buildings, small portfolios, companies. We see the benefits of scale. We see the benefits of high-quality complementary portfolios. It's what are things priced at? Are they for sale or not? Can everything line up? And those sort of things we-
There's a lot of stuff, for example. You've been in China forever. I know it's only small. There's a lot of stress there at the moment, but you guys have stayed there. You could probably clean up and buy a lot of stuff if you want. Is there appetite for that, or have you got enough just to bed down with what you've got going on now?
No, there's appetite for it. There's no place that we don't have appetite and look at portfolios closely.
Okay. All right. Let's move on to data centers.
Okay.
Strategy, expertise, maybe just a general update on what's happening.
Yeah. I recognize most everybody here, but if there's anybody kind of new to the story here, I would just back up by saying, Prologis has always had a mindset towards higher and better use conversion of our real estate. We acknowledge we don't have the sexiest product type in warehouses. It's a low use of land, as I just described. Takes a lot of land to deliver one facility. But a big part of our thesis has been to buy product close into population centers, where it's in high demand now from the advent of e-commerce and everything else, but its potential to be upscaled and converted to some better use than logistics was always there. I would say every year, we've had the occasional office conversion, some retail, life science conversion.
Data centers have emerged as the most significant opportunity for that because it's not just one user or one case. It's a whole industry that's being built, where we have 6,000 buildings and 14,000 acres of land we own or control. All of it is quite suitable for data center use, provided you have power there and a market behind it. So we've leaned into this opportunity very significantly in the last, probably four years now. Built a very capable world-class team around it. We're about 75 people strong. Importantly, aggregating power, of course, you will all know, will be about 5.8 GW of power, either secured or in advanced stages, and have had a very good track record since, I would say, our intentional run on this business of getting projects started.
We started about $4 billion since, I would say, that's a formal launch of build-to-suit transactions, hyperscale credits. We approach this business in a de-risked way, I would say. We acknowledge we are not a data center company on its face. We're a logistics company. We don't intend to own data centers on our balance sheet over the long term. We may own residual interest in JVs. We'll see how that plays out over time. But we see a value creation opportunity to pursue, reinvest all those profits back into our core business. So in that mindset, we want to do it in as risk mitigated way as possible, so that involves bringing power on as inexpensively as possible without going long power, if you will. Only commencing vertical development when we have a high credit tenant lease in hand.
And then, so far our track record has been to sell assets post their completion, and once again, redeploy back into our own business. It's been going very well, and our outlook is very favorable. I'll mention the 5.8 GW of energy that we have. That sits on less than 1% of our sites today. So often there's a question of, well, how much bigger can it be? We've talked about 10 GW. I think 10 GW, if you ask me, well, why can't it be 20 GW or 30 GW? I wouldn't have a good answer for you. It could be. If there is that long of a runway on this build-out, we have no shortage of sites and capability and capital to keep transacting on it.
Maybe you can just touch on the funding side, because I think for data centers globally, where people have been a little surprised, historically. Now, I think we all get it, is that they need to be funded.
So how are we handling funding?
Yeah. The approach to that, whether it funds and balance sheet-
Yeah.
or just capital recycling, selling to do the next one.
That's right. Mostly capital recycling. Look, we're blessed to have a huge balance sheet. I guess it's intentional. We got it to this place. But we can take on. We've got billions of dollars of data center development ongoing at any point in time. We've got a debt to EBITDA in the low fives. You've seen us sit in that range for a long period of time. It's a little bit hard to move the needle on our balance sheet. We've been able to take all the volume on, I don't want to say easily, but we arrange the sources and uses. That's my and my team's job to make that all work.
Now, what we talked about in July was sort of the conclusion of an effort we undertook to explore the private equity markets to see what LPs may want to do in terms of different frameworks, really should larger opportunities come along that we would be less comfortable funding solely on our balance sheet. We're talking about large turnkey kind of developments. We've established those relationships, some framework on how they would go, and that's a new tool in the toolbox to be sure we can chase those opportunities as well.
Would you announce those as they happen or just-
Yeah. They would probably come along by deal, would be my guess, and we will certainly tell you as they happen.
Is that only for super large?
At this point, yeah. Like I said, we are quite comfortable doing powered shell. I mean, we are doing turnkey transactions on our balance sheet presently as well. It is just, if the opportunity set grows and the leasing pace accelerates, having a couple of alternatives in terms of capital funding that look accretive in total, we have lined up.
Can I just ask what money wants in terms of return?
I'd rather not comment on that right now.
Forgive me for asking that.
Yeah.
I'll try.
Thanks. Formerly sexy, now boring question. Can you talk about currently, e-commerce's percentage of sales? Any geographic or comment on, and where do you see it going?
Sorry, just to repeat, that question was on e-commerce sales and where that is going.
E-commerce sale in the U.S., I think we are about 24% of retail sales are occurring in e-commerce, somewhere about there. We still see roughly one percentage point, 100 basis points of growth per year in that penetration rate, at least through the end of the decade. So that is to say we kind of see 28%, 29%, 30% of retail sales in e-commerce by 2030. Again, if you are newer to the story, the reason this is so important and exciting, and you are right, we forget about an important growth driver here, but there is a 3x multiplier on logistics demand for every dollar of retail sales that shifts those channels. So that continued penetration is something we are always looking for and excited about. Europe is around 16%, 17%. It is similarly growing, but at a slightly lower rate. LATAM is growing in big ways.
We have large customers, not our number one customer necessarily, but others in the e-com space who are growing significantly outside of the U.S. We are seeing e-com leasing in the high teens percentage of our new leasing. That had similarly stepped back a little bit in 2023 and 2024. It has come back and we always like to highlight that, yes, we are a very big Amazon landlord, but in any given quarter, there is roughly 35, 40 individual names leasing from us in the e-commerce space. So its breadth is much more than people appreciate.
And Amazon?
Amazon, we are very active. They are active, and we are active with them.
I missed one question on the data centers, and I do not want to get in trouble from Samir, so I am just going to zip back quickly. How much power is secured today versus how much you are potentially going to need over the next 5-10 years?
Yeah.
You can touch on your solar as well.
Yeah. Okay. So that is 5.8 GW. I think 1.6 GW of that is secure. The remainder is in our advanced stages. As you watch us, that secure number, I believe, dropped from our prior reporting of it. That is because we are monetizing that power bank. We had two big quarters of starts in the first half of this year, over $2 billion.
Fully build our guidance bucket on data center starts, so we feel great about that. So that number is going to bounce around a little bit. I already spoke to just how much larger that pipeline could be, so I will not repeat that part. Sarah also mentioned just the solar side for our energy business. So we are generating or storing 1.4 GW of solar power in our portfolio today. Makes up about 8% of our portfolio, so it tells you there is a lot of runway there.
The largest growth market for us remains the U.S., where we see we can continue to build out pretty significantly.
Okay, thank you. Moving on, we can turn to the funds business. So, fundraising versus redemptions, new capital in, promote opportunities.
Yeah. Funds business is going very well. Look, if I go back four years, I remember the third quarter of 2022 is when we had our first meaningful tick-up in rates. Discount rates, return requirements shifted for everybody. LPs, private investors, that was a moment where they were stepping back, reevaluating their investments. It's also at a time where I would say kind of a run on investment in logistics real estate from institutional investors.
A lot of that run had taken place. A lot of people needed that exposure and filled their tickets. So we had denominator issues, blah, blah. So that business has been softer in terms of capital raising for a number of years now. But we haven't just sat back and waited for it to come back to life. We've been inventing new vehicles to attract that capital.
You've seen that in the last six, nine months, we've launched a number of new vehicles that are spanning geographies, they're spanning formats. We've included more exposure to our development business, which I'll say for, coming back to the balance sheet, is very well timed with the fact that we have growing calls on our capital for both logistics development and data centers. So it's welcome to have some development capital in the system as well.
So I think our open-ended funds, their fundraising will get back to normal, but probably more in a maintenance mode. A little bit of growth. We'll see how that plays out. But we see LPs wanting to come in on a more JV level with big sponsors like Prologis, aggregate some exposure around GPs. We've been pursuing that quite actively.
Your house view on the impact of U.S. trade policy, in terms of your employer, U.S. maybe. As Canadian, I will ask about Canada, your views on Canada in that regard.
Last second quarter of 2025, a little over a year ago, and definitely into the third quarter, we started talking about tariff exhaustion. We had a lot of questions from I forget what we call it, April 2nd. What was it called?
Liberation Day.
Liberation Day. How could I forget? We were all concerned about what it meant and how would our customers behave, but it only took six months to see that customers were looking past it generally. For those very directly reliant on specifics on trade policy, they found different vendors and networks to reorient themselves around, but they cannot forego their logistics footprint, and we saw decision-making resume. I think that has simply continued.
Every quarter since then has brought new tariff news. The situation with Canada is a bit more extreme, acknowledged. I do not think it has us concerned on our logistics demand there, because so much of the use of our space, we found, is focused on local consumption regardless. We are principally in Toronto. It is a tremendous market, very supply constrained. It is performing very well. It is fine.
But yeah, just generally in terms of customer behavior, I think they are looking past all that. They cannot rationally plan on the amount of changes in those policies.
Anywhere it is positive?
I think everywhere, academically, it is a sort of a positive in that I think the disruption that it brings, the notion of needing redundant supply chains, like the premise of that. These things tend to lean into demand for logistics. You may need more space. You may need a duplicative supply chain. It is not a significant part of our underwriting, but I think directionally, that is where this kind of noise takes you.
All right. We have only got three minutes left, so if it is okay, I am going to do the next few questions sort of as rapid fire. But, and there is only a couple. So what do you think, or is there anything that you think the market is ignoring or not appreciating that is going to impact you or real estate or logistics in the years ahead, or year ahead?
I think it's probably this market rent growth piece that I unpacked a little bit earlier. Look, we had a couple years of negative market rent growth. Including last year, I think we were a little over 4% down on market rents. I want everyone to be reminded and understand there's still positive market rent growth in all those years because we're still capturing the COVID era rents.
But I think there's just been such a mindset that rents are depressing logistics, or their growth is at least. I think getting a little bit ahead on the thinking and just doing your own work, don't trust me, but just your own work on does inflation plus make sense, and do we see replacement cost rent gaps close over time? We see that in past cycles.
We think we see that, and I think the case that there is a day of mid-single digit, maybe better, for some years running, is very strong.
Okay. We've got three rapid-fire questions we're asking everyone. Very short answers, please. If long-term rates stay higher for longer, which is going to have the biggest impact on logistics? One, higher borrowing costs. Two, lower transaction activity. Or three, less new supply.
In the short run, I'll say less new supply.
Okay. Over the next three years, will third-party capital become a more important source of growth for public REITs than balance sheet capital? Yes or no.
These are essay questions. Yes.
I am very simple. I like to keep it very simple.
I can put it in one word.
For logistics, will 2027 same-store NOI growth be higher, the same, or lower than 2026?
I think it will be about the same.
Thank you very much. Would you like to make any closing remarks?
No. Great questions. We just feel great about every corner of the business right now. Thanks for listening.
Perfect. Thanks.