Half of a logistics site is not building, and the yard decides how much: a single-sided warehouse and a cross-dock on the same footprint need sites 21 per cent apart.
Build the site up from the building: the service yard along the dock face, trailer and car parking, a perimeter road, then landscaping and drainage on top. An illustrative 20,000 m² single-sided warehouse needs a 40,471 m² site, 4.05 hectares or about 10 acres, a site coverage of 49.4 per cent. The same building as a cross-dock needs 49,059 m², 40.8 per cent coverage.
Worked in full in Logistics and Industrial Real Estate by Julian R. Sterling, with every figure reproduced in a free workbook.See the book on Amazon →
Developers quote site coverage as if it were a planning fact. It is an output of the yard, and the yard is an output of how the occupier moves goods. Getting it wrong means either a land bid that cannot be built out or a scheme that leaves the occupier queuing trucks on the public road.
| Input | Value |
|---|---|
| Building footprint, long side × depth | 200 m × 100 m |
| Service yard depth along the dock face | 35 m |
| Trailer parking bays, at 50 m² with aisle | 30 |
| Car spaces, at 25 m² with aisle | 120 |
| Perimeter road for fire access, width | 6 m |
| Gatehouse, plant and bins | 500 m² |
| Landscaping, drainage ponds and margins, share of the gross site | 15% |
| Land price per m² of site | 250 |
The allowances are illustrative. Local planning rules on parking, drainage and landscaping vary widely, and a site's shape matters as much as its area: an awkward triangle loses more than any rule of thumb allows.
| Element | Calculation | Single-sided m² | Cross-dock m² |
|---|---|---|---|
| Building | 200 × 100 | 20,000 | 20,000 |
| Service yard | 200 × 35, per yard | 7,000 | 14,000 |
| Trailer parking | 30 × 50, per yard | 1,500 | 3,000 |
| Car parking | 120 × 25 | 3,000 | 3,000 |
| Perimeter road | sides without a yard × 6 | 2,400 | 1,200 |
| Gatehouse, plant | 500 | 500 | |
| Developed area | 34,400 | 41,700 | |
| Landscaping and drainage | developed / 0.85 − developed | 6,071 | 7,359 |
| Gross site | 40,471 | 49,059 |
The perimeter road runs on the 400 m of perimeter not already served by a yard on the single-sided scheme, and on 200 m for the cross-dock, where both long sides have yards.
Site coverage = building footprint / gross site = 20,000 / 40,471 = 49.4%
Site per m² of building = 40,471 / 20,000 = 2.02
Excel: =Bldg/((Bldg+Yard+Trailers+Cars+Road+Misc)/(1-15%))
In imperial terms, a 215,278 sq ft warehouse needs 10.0 acres single-sided and 12.1 acres as a cross-dock. Half of the site, 50.6 per cent, is not building, and the yard alone is 17.3 per cent of it.
At 250 per m² of site, the single-sided site costs 10,117,647: 506 per m² of building. The cross-dock site costs 12,264,706, or 613 per m². The second yard costs 2,147,059 of land, 107 per m² of building, and it is only worth paying if the occupier's flows need simultaneous inbound and outbound docks. The number of doors that justifies it is worked out in how many dock doors a warehouse needs.
| Land price per m² of site | Single-sided | Cross-dock |
|---|---|---|
| 100 | 202 | 245 |
| 250 | 506 | 613 |
| 500 | 1,012 | 1,226 |
| 1,000 | 2,024 | 2,453 |
Where land is cheap, coverage barely matters; near cities it dominates the cost of the building. At 1,000 per m² of site the land costs several times the construction itself, which is why urban logistics schemes push coverage up with tighter yards, decked parking or multi-storey designs.
| Yard depth, m | Gross site m² | Coverage | Acres |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 | 39,294 | 50.9% | 9.7 |
| 35 | 40,471 | 49.4% | 10.0 |
| 40 | 41,647 | 48.0% | 10.3 |
| 50 | 44,000 | 45.5% | 10.9 |
A deep yard is one of the specification thresholds occupiers check first, because articulated vehicles need room to turn and park clear of the docks. Cutting it to save land saves little: going from 35 m to 30 m frees about 1,180 m² of site and produces a building that some occupiers will not take.
A land bid built on 60 per cent coverage assumes a 33,333 m² site for this building. The real requirement is 40,471 m², 7,137 m² or 17.6 per cent more. Work it the other way and the error is worse: a 100,000 m² site does not take 60,000 m² of warehouse, it takes about 49,419 m² single-sided, and the residual land value falls with the floor area. Build the site from the yard and the parking before the land price is agreed, and test the result against the residual, as in how to calculate residual land value.
Coverage is a ratio of footprint, not floor area. Mezzanines and two-storey offices add floor area without adding footprint, so they raise the floor area a site can carry without changing the coverage.
The book treats land, cost and letting risk as one calculation, and the free workbook for this case carries the development residual and the land check.
It follows from the yard layout rather than from a fixed ratio. On the illustrative build-up a single-sided warehouse covers 49.4 per cent of its site and a cross-dock 40.8 per cent, because the second yard and its trailer parking add 8,500 m². A deeper 50 m yard brings single-sided coverage down to 45.5 per cent.
About 10. The illustrative 20,000 m² building, 215,278 sq ft, needs a 40,471 m² site with a single-sided yard: 4.05 hectares or 10.0 acres. Laid out as a cross-dock it needs 49,059 m², 12.1 acres. Car parking for a large shift and generous landscaping push it higher.
Divide the site area by the building area and multiply by the land price. At 2.02 m² of site per m² of building and 250 per m² of land, the land costs 506 per m² of warehouse, or 10,117,647 in total. For a cross-dock, at 2.45 m² of site per m², it is 613.
This article is one calculation from Logistics and Industrial Real Estate. The book takes the same case from first principles to the decision, chapter by chapter, and every figure it prints is a live formula in the free companion workbooks.
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