The scarcest industrial space in Singapore is a good warehouse
Singapore’s warehouses stood 89.4% occupied in the first quarter of 2026, and the prime logistics segment — the modern, high-specification sheds every third-party operator wants — stood at 95.8%, with CBRE expecting roughly 97% by the end of the year. Warehouse rents rose for twenty consecutive quarters through the third quarter of 2025, on Cushman & Wakefield’s reading of JTC’s statistics, before the pace cooled to 0.2% quarter on quarter in early 2026. The market is not booming; it is simply full. The next purpose-built prime logistics project after the current pipeline is not expected until around 2028, which means the space that exists is the space there is.
That scarcity is a policy outcome as much as a market one. Industrial land in Singapore is allocated by JTC, the state industrial-estate developer, on terms designed to keep it in productive use — and there is very little of it. The result is a warehouse stock unlike anywhere else in Southeast Asia: vertical, expensive, tightly regulated and, increasingly, automated.
Why the sheds go up instead of out
The signature Singapore format is the ramp-up warehouse: a multi-storey building whose upper floors are reached by vehicular ramps wide enough for articulated trucks, so a 40-foot container can be delivered to a loading dock on the fourth storey. The alternative — the older cargo-lift warehouse, where goods travel between floors by freight lift — survives across the island but trades at a discount, because a lift is a bottleneck and a ramp is not. When occupiers and agents talk about “prime” logistics space, ramp-up access is usually the first qualifying criterion, ahead of floor loading, ceiling height and power.
The scale of the newest generation is considerable. JLL counts the LOGOS Tuas Logistics Hub, completed in 2022, at 2.7 million square feet, and Toll City at Tuas, completed in 2017, at 1.1 million square feet. In the third quarter of 2025 alone, a 1.1-million-square-foot warehouse completed at 15 Benoi Sector alongside half a million square feet of prime logistics space at Toh Guan Road East. These are buildings on the scale of regional distribution centres elsewhere, stacked four and five floors high because the land beneath them cannot be widened.
Bonded space: nine free-trade zones and the zero-GST layer
A large share of what sits in Singapore’s warehouses never formally enters Singapore. The island operates nine free-trade zones under the Free Trade Zones Act — five serving the seaport (Keppel, Pasir Panjang, Jurong, Tuas and Sembawang) and four serving the airport (Changi FTZ, the Airport Logistics Park of Singapore, the Changi Airfreight Centre and Air Cargo Express). Goods held inside them are outside Singapore’s customs territory: no duty, no GST, for as long as they wait to tranship.
Outside the zones, Singapore Customs licenses private bonded space through the Zero-GST Warehouse Scheme, which suspends import GST on overseas goods stored in approved premises. This is the layer commissioned by traders and forwarders who want bonded storage inside their own operations rather than at the port — and it is a genuine asset. Halcon Primo Logistics, a Singapore-headquartered forwarder on the Singapore Industry Index record, owns a seven-hectare zero-GST bonded hub outright within a footprint of more than 838,000 square feet of bonded, non-bonded and automated warehousing.
Automation is becoming the floor plate
Land scarcity and labour cost push Singapore’s warehouses toward density earlier than their neighbours, and the visible expression is automated storage and retrieval — high-bay ASRS cranes, shuttle systems and grid-based goods-to-person systems of the AutoStore type. DSV’s largest Singapore facility, DSV Pearl, is a five-storey building of roughly 66,000 square metres running AutoStore automation with temperature-controlled zones for healthcare, technology and retail cargo. The intralogistics integrators — Daifuku, SSI Schaefer, Swisslog and their peers — run regional engineering bases in Singapore largely because this is the market where the systems are ordered first.
The caveat: the index and the prime market tell different stories
The headline numbers need one honest qualification. JTC’s warehouse rental index covers the entire stock, old cargo-lift sheds included, and overall warehouse occupancy actually slipped 0.4 percentage points in the first quarter of 2026 even as prime logistics tightened toward 97%. The market is two-speed: modern ramp-up and automated space is effectively full, while older, lower-specification buildings carry the vacancy. A further 8 million square feet of industrial space is due to complete across 2026, but 60.5% of it is single-user factories, not warehouses. Anyone pricing “the Singapore warehouse market” off the averages will misprice both halves.
Who holds and runs the space
The sheds are largely owned by listed landlords and run by operators — a distinction the Singapore Industry Index record keeps. AIMS APAC REIT held S$955.7 million of logistics and warehouse assets in Singapore at 31 March 2026 within a 28-property portfolio valued at S$2.25 billion. Halcon Primo Logistics runs its owned bonded hub alongside air, ocean and cross-border road freight. DSV operates DSV Pearl, one of the island’s largest automated warehouses. Together they span the three things this market is about: the landlord, the bonded operator and the automated shed.