Savills forecasts €156 billion in European property investment through Q3 2026

Savills put European real estate investment at €156 billion, or $182.5 billion, for the first three quarters of 2026 in research published on October 1, the day after the period closed, four percent above the same stretch of 2025. The total is the least informative line in it. Central and Eastern Europe is expected to finish the nine months 34 percent ahead of the equivalent 2025 period, the Nordics 25 percent and Southern Europe 20 percent, while Western Europe is down 5 percent — a 39-point gap between the fastest and slowest regions of one continent drawn from a single research house. That timing makes the estimate read closer to a preliminary tally than to a forecast.

Spain continues to draw significant capital, the adviser says, on resilient economic performance and an attractive relative sovereign risk premium. Italy's activity is transaction-led, with large deals carrying the volume and out-of-town retail, hospitality and logistics drawing the strongest interest. For anyone raising a fund, the buyer mix there matters more than the country total: value-added capital remains prominent in Italy while core investors return only gradually, so pricing is still being reset asset by asset and the bid is earlier in this recovery than a four percent headline suggests.

That ranking rewards markets with domestic and regional buyer pools, the Nordics leaning on Norwegian and local groups and Poland on Czech neighbours.

Sweden's softer third-quarter estimate follows a strong first half built on several large transactions, and Savills still reports robust appetite from domestic and Norwegian groups, an active pipeline and scope for improvement in the fourth quarter. Poland is pulling intra-regional capital, particularly from Czech investors, with defense and manufacturing activity increasingly supporting its outlook; both readings describe demand that is industrial and intra-regional, consistent with European logistics take-up running 20.5 percent higher in the first half, as this publication reported in August.

The regional split also complicates the standard telling of a European recovery, which usually runs through the Western core. When the east, the south and the Nordics hold the fastest growth, incremental capital is moving into higher-yield, more management-intensive markets — the same places value-added fundraising has been aimed at for two years. If Western Europe stays negative through the fourth quarter while Central and Eastern Europe, the Nordics and Southern Europe compound, 2026 becomes a year in which geography, more than the cycle, sets the bid. Retail is where that geography shows most clearly, since Savills' September research on Europe's prime shopping-center rents rested two percent annual growth on Lisbon and Milan, and Italy is where the adviser now points to out-of-town retail demand.