Across Europe, life sciences real estate deals keep coming back to the same places. Of c. 480 locations, just 80 are repeat performers. And 20 of those 80 locations account for almost half of all deals we have tracked since 2022.
For years we have logged these deals in our database. That now adds up to more than 2,000 deals, nearly 1,800 of them since 2022, spread right across the map, from London and Munich to Lendava in Slovenia and Kokkola in Finland. With that much history in one place, we can step back and ask a simple question: where does the activity really happen?
The persistent 80
We call a location persistent if it hosts at least one deal in three or more of the five years from 2022 to 2026 (year to date). A single good year isn’t enough; persistence means coming back, again and again.
Only 80 of those c. 480 locations pass that test. Some appear in three years, some in four and some in all five. Yet those 80 places account for around seven in ten deals.
Germany and the UK lead the way, with almost half of the 80 between them. The Netherlands, Ireland, France and Spain follow, and the rest are spread across the Nordics, the Baltics, Belgium, Italy and a handful of other countries.
The Five-Year Club
Within the 80 sits an even more exclusive club. Twenty locations have recorded deals in all five years. Together they form the Five-Year Club, and between them they account for almost half of all deals.
At the top is the golden triangle. London, Cambridge and Oxford alone take more than a fifth of all deals since 2022. Dublin, Berlin, Munich, Barcelona and Paris follow.
The other members of the Five-Year Club are Amsterdam, Cologne, Cork, Delft, Galway, Hamburg, Heidelberg, Leiden, Limerick, Madrid, Mainz and Utrecht.
The long tail
Five in six locations sit outside the persistent 80, with deals in just one or two years. New names join the map every year, so the tail keeps growing. Some of today’s newcomers will become tomorrow’s repeat performers, and the 80 will grow with them. Meanwhile, the core holds firm.
Just a taste
This analysis used only two fields: city and year. Our database holds far more, and every deal in it can be filtered and sorted in seconds.
Do you want to know who is driving deals in the Five-Year Club? Or how your own market compares? The answers are already in the data.
Note: portfolio deals spanning several locations are excluded.