The Middle East conflict is disrupting equity markets and pushing down industrial asset valuations in Australia, creating the strongest buying opportunity in years, Rob McMickan, co-founder and joint managing director of Hale Capital Partners, told the Mingtiandi Singapore Forum this week.
McMickan acknowledged that Australian industrial assets face near-term headwinds — rising yields pushing valuations lower and tenants delaying leasing decisions — but argued that investors who can deploy through the current volatility are poised to achieve strong returns.
“We don’t shy away from the fact that over the next six to 12 months there’ll be challenges in the market when it comes to cap-rate re-ratings, as well as income growth being slower and occupancy decisions taking longer. But we fundamentally believe that that’s a temporary pause as opposed to a structural change in the logistics market in Australia,” he said.
McMickan’s thesis was echoed by fellow panellists active across Asia Pacific, who were speaking at the Yardi-sponsored event.
McMickan was joined on stage by representatives of law firm Baker McKenzie, Vietnam investment firm Indochina Capital Corporation, and Macquarie Asset Management-backed industrial platform LogiSpace, with the executives arguing that near-term disruption from the Middle East conflict is creating buying opportunities across APAC industrial markets.
Pent-Up Demand in Australia
Darren Searle, co-founder and co-CEO of LogiSpace, agreed with McMickan on pent-up demand for Australian industrial assets, noting that foreign owner surcharges in Victoria and Queensland had caused a repricing of cap rates and more recently land prices, which he read as creating an opportunity rather than a structural setback.
Rob McMickan, co-founder and joint managing director of Hale Capital Partners (Image: Mingtiandi)
“There’s a pause that’s occurred as a consequence of what’s happened in the Middle East. But when you look at the long-term, even last year in Victoria and some of the states, we were forecasting a slower period of time. The net take-up that occurred in those markets was right on trend for the long-term and performed very, very well,” Searle said.
Speaking as a “proud Victorian,” he said the state had “suffered in a big way” in terms of capital transactions, with investment activity having gone “off a cliff” before beginning to recover this year.
Searle described industrial and logistics assets as critical infrastructure for supply chains, and said the Middle East conflict is reviving just-in-case inventory behaviour last seen during COVID, which he expected would bring large occupiers back to the greenfield market.
“The demand that’s going to come from the big end of town, the big occupiers, be it Coles, be it Woolworths, be it Bunnings — some of those briefs are so large that they cannot be accommodated in existing warehouse opportunities,” he said.
Searle also argued that Australia’s relative lag in e-commerce adoption, compared with the US and UK, is a structural tailwind, with significant demand growth still ahead as the country catches up with more mature markets.
Agreeing on the population growth and leasing demand outlook, McMickan said the development pipeline for Australian industrial was forecast to fall 50 percent over the next one to two years, creating a supply-side opportunity for developers willing to look through near-term volatility.
Hale made that conviction concrete in March, securing A$750 million in equity commitments from Warburg Pincus and Oxford Properties for the second version of its logistics investment platform.
In April Hale acquired Scoresby Industry Park in Melbourne for about A$120 million, the city’s biggest industrial transaction so far this year.
Vietnam’s Buying Window
Michael Piro, co-CEO of Indochina Capital Corporation, said Vietnam’s industrial real estate sector was at an inflection point he had not encountered in more than two decades of operating in the country.
“I’ve never seen an opportunity quite so prolific as what we’re seeing right now in the early stages of the institutionalisation of Vietnam’s industrial real estate sector,” said Piro, whose firm is planning to quadruple its built space to one million square metres (10.8 million square feet) over the next 18 months.
He said the Middle East conflict was pushing up construction costs and slowing new supply, while demand from manufacturers relocating out of China remained strong.
Piro said rising construction costs and expanding cap rates had created a buying window for ready-built factories in markets such as Haiphong Port City, where early institutional investors were approaching the end of their fund lives and facing exit pressure.
The Vietnamese government is investing five to six percent of GDP in infrastructure — roads, ports and bridges — to support the country’s manufacturing-led growth, he said, adding that Vietnam’s economy grew at about 8 percent last year and with 10 percent growth targetted in 2026.
Selective Recovery Across APAC
Shirin Tang, head of mergers and acquisitions in Singapore at Baker McKenzie Wong & Leow, said the nature of industrial investment in APAC had shifted markedly since 2025, with investors moving from managing existing portfolios to deploying fresh capital, but approaching new investments with considerably more discipline than during the COVID-era boom.
“It’s much more disciplined. It’s much more selective. There’s more careful leasing decisions, tenant cost controls. It’s no longer just a broad sector of logistics,” she said.
Tang said investors were seeking upside from strong demographics, consumption growth and AI-driven demand while simultaneously structuring for downside protection.
“There’s a great focus on investment criteria and exactly what kind of assets a platform can look at, a lot of scrutiny and negotiation over exit rights, and what sort of say the investors get over things like that,” Tang said.
She said capital markets activity was returning selectively, with Singapore REITs and IPO pipelines in India and China showing renewed momentum, alongside increased secondary transactions out of funds as the line between M&A and funds activity continued to blur.