Housing is now the largest asset in European real estate: it overtakes offices and retail, and Germany displaces the United Kingdom

10/09/2026 – ⏱ 6 min · By Realty Investor Editorial Team

This article is for informational purposes only and does not, under any circumstances, constitute investment advice or a recommendation.

For decades, talk of institutional real estate in Europe meant, above all, offices and shopping centres. That map has changed. The One Real Estate Universe report, produced jointly by INREV (the European association of non-listed real estate investment vehicles) and EPRA (the association of European listed real estate companies), places residential as the largest sector in European institutional portfolios, in both the listed and the non-listed market. The study covers nearly two decades of data and concludes that both universes, which are usually analysed separately, have followed a very similar path: they have reached institutional scale, have reduced their borrowing since the financial crisis and have reoriented their portfolios towards the sectors with the best structural prospects.

Residential becomes the leading sector

At the end of 2025, housing accounted for 26.4% of the portfolios of the non-listed funds included in the INREV index and 28.8% of the listed real estate companies in the EPRA index. Both figures also include student housing, a segment that the European sector classification groups within residential in the broad sense. It is the first time the sector has held first place in both universes at the same time.

The breakdown of the rest of the portfolio helps to gauge the scale of the change. In the non-listed market, industrial and logistics assets rank second with 24.6%, offices stand at 18.7% and retail reaches just 12.1%. Among listed companies the transformation is somewhat less intense: offices still account for 23.1% and retail holds 20.7%. Combined, offices and retail make up 43.8% of listed exposure, compared with 30.8% in the non-listed market. In other words, the non-listed vehicle has rotated its portfolio faster than the listed company.

Retail's weight falls to less than half since 2012

The loss of prominence of retail is the most pronounced shift in the period analysed. In the non-listed market, retail's weight went from 25.1% to 12.1% between 2012 and 2025. Among listed companies, the fall was from 42.6% to 20.7%. In both cases, the sector has lost more than half of its relative share in little more than a decade.

The report attributes the adjustment to structural rather than cyclical factors: the growth of e-commerce, the financial difficulties of some large shopping centre owners and the reallocation of capital towards segments with more sustained demand. Offices have also lost ground, particularly visibly after the pandemic and the spread of hybrid working. They remain one of the main components of portfolios, but they are no longer the natural destination for new capital.

The result is that housing and logistics together now account for more than half of the non-listed real estate portfolio analysed by INREV. The study interprets this shift as a structural transformation of allocations, and not as a passing movement of the last cycle.

Germany replaces the United Kingdom as the leading European market

The sectoral change is overlaid by a geographical one. Germany has displaced the United Kingdom as the leading market for both non-listed funds and listed real estate companies: it accounts for 24.6% of the non-listed portfolio and 23.4% of the listed one. The report links this advance above all to the growth of the large German residential platforms and to corporate consolidation in the segment.

The most frequently cited example comes from the stock market. The combination of Vonovia and Deutsche Wohnen, completed in 2021, created a company with around 568,000 homes and real estate assets of close to €90 billion. A transaction of that size on its own reshapes a country's weight within a sector index.

The United Kingdom, for its part, has lost relative weight: its share of the listed portfolio fell from approximately 26% in 2012 to 18% in 2025. The report itself qualifies the figure: that fall does not necessarily imply a contraction of British assets in absolute terms, but rather much faster growth in German housing and in pan-European logistics platforms. It is as much a denominator effect as a numerator effect.

A market worth more than two trillion euros

The transformation is taking place on a base that already exceeds two trillion euros. The non-listed European real estate universe reached a gross asset value (GAV) of around €1.03 trillion at the end of 2025. The listed universe stood at close to €971 billion in terms of implied gross value adjusted for net asset value (NAV). Non-listed real estate equity funds alone amounted to approximately €519 billion.

The cumulative growth is considerable: the market as a whole has grown almost fivefold in size since 2005, when its gross value was around €219 billion. That leap in scale is precisely what makes it possible today to speak of an institutionalised European real estate market, with comparable indices and long series.

Listed and non-listed: two routes with different logics

The report devotes a significant part to comparing the two forms of access. The listed market makes it possible to invest with greater liquidity in specialised companies and allows faster rotation between sectors: buying and selling a share is immediate, compared with the timeframes of a closed-ended vehicle. Non-listed vehicles tend to offer portfolios that are more diversified by country and asset type, although their allocation changes take place more slowly, conditioned by fundraising, investment and divestment cycles.

These differences also determine where each exposure sits. German housing is mainly in the hands of listed companies, while residential exposure in the Netherlands is channelled mostly through non-listed vehicles. Something similar happens with retail: French retail is dominated by the stock market, while private funds predominate in Portuguese retail. For INREV and EPRA, the conclusion is that the two formulas should not be understood as competing alternatives, but as complementary routes to building a European real estate portfolio. The question would no longer be choosing between listed and non-listed, but determining which combination provides the best access to each country and each sector.

Why this matters to the real-estate investor

The report describes the behaviour of institutional capital, not that of the individual investor, but the snapshot offers useful readings. The first concerns context: when funds and listed companies concentrate their exposure in residential and logistics, they are signalling where they see structural demand in Europe, and that is the same underlying asset that finances a large share of the real estate crowdfunding and crowdlending projects published by European platforms. The housing shortage in the continent's main markets is the factor that explains both the rotation of institutional portfolios and the volume of residential transactions in crowdfunding.

The second reading concerns liquidity. The study stresses that the practical difference between listed and non-listed lies not so much in the asset as in the ease of getting in and out. It is a pertinent reminder for any direct real estate investment vehicle: crowdfunding shares with the non-listed market the absence of a deep secondary market, so capital remains committed until the project's maturity. If a project publishes a target return, it is worth remembering that this estimate is subject to investment risk and is not guaranteed.

A reading for the investor

These figures should be handled with the caution they require. They are portfolio composition percentages based on the INREV and EPRA indices, not a measurement of the European real estate market as a whole: they exclude the holdings of private individuals, much of corporate real estate and vehicles not included in those indices. Valuations in the non-listed market are also based on periodic appraisals, which react with a lag to market prices, whereas listed companies are valued every day on the stock market; comparing the two universes requires bearing that methodological gap in mind. And a growing weight in portfolios indicates where capital has moved, not that the movement will continue or that it has been profitable. Past results do not predict future ones, and all real-estate investment carries risks of illiquidity, default and total or partial loss of capital.

At European level, the activity of crowdfunding platforms is governed by Regulation (EU) 2020/1503 and, in Spain, by the implementing legislation and CNMV supervision, which sets, among other obligations, the key investment information sheet, the limits applicable to non-sophisticated investors and the requirements for disclosing each platform's default rates.

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