Marcus Meijer and the value of the last mile

A luxury shopping arcade and a warehouse have more in common than either would care to admit. Both need people nearby. Both need tenants with a reason to stay. And both can become a different investment when somebody pays attention to the unglamorous details. Marcus Meijer’s career has travelled between these worlds, from the polished shopfronts of Burlington Arcade to the loading doors of Europe’s urban logistics buildings.

The journey follows a change in how cities shop. A customer can admire a handbag in a window, order something on a phone, and expect it at home the next day. Behind each choice sits a property. Meijer, the London-based founder and chief executive of MARK Capital Management, has invested around that connection, first through a business closely associated with retail and later through specialist platforms including Crossbay.

The scale became visible in September 2022. Prologis bought Crossbay’s initial portfolio for €1.585 billion: 128 logistics facilities and six development opportunities across seven countries. A collection of relatively small buildings had become a transaction large enough to command the attention of an institutional buyer. The interesting part of Meijer’s story is how the collection came together.

A family business, with a detour through Chicago

Property was already a family occupation. His father, Ton Meijer, built the development business MAB; Marcus’s later investment firm grew from that background. But his early working life took him beyond the family company. He joined Hines in 1995, working in Chicago and London, then Goldman Sachs’ Principal Investment Team in 1997.

His education combined a law master’s at Leiden University with an INSEAD MBA. At MAB, he became chief financial officer and handled a strategic restructuring before the business was sold. In 2004, he founded the firm that became MARK. Development, finance and the disposition of an existing business all preceded the job of asking investors to back a new one.

Those stages help explain the range of work that followed. A building can require legal judgement, a financing decision and a plan for what happens inside it. Meijer’s career had put him close to each. The business originally called Meyer Bergman would become known for retail property, where the difference between a busy address and a productive investment can be considerable.

The arcade that already looked finished

Burlington Arcade offered a particular challenge: it already looked like somewhere an investor should want to own. Meyer Bergman and Thor Equities acquired it in October 2010. Its heritage was part of its attraction, but heritage alone supplied no programme for improving its commercial performance. That required decisions about the building and its occupants.

Over the following years, the owners worked on the listed property and changed the mix of brands. When Meyer Bergman sold its 50 percent interest to the Reuben brothers in June 2018, it reported that rental income had more than doubled during its ownership. The result had taken more than seven years of work.

“We saw the hidden potential for the arcade when others only saw a mature institutional asset.”

Marcus Meijer, on the 2018 Burlington Arcade disposal

The observation contains much of his investment approach. An established building can still have a commercial second act. Sometimes the work is visible in a refurbishment. Sometimes it sits in leases, tenant selection and the way separate decisions reinforce one another. Even a rather distinguished arcade has to earn its living.

The eventual buyer receives the benefit of that work in a more settled form. This distinction between improving a property and owning it for the long term would recur as Meijer’s business moved into other sectors. He was building an organisation able to do the intermediate work, then offer the result to investors with different requirements.

Following the shopping bag home

The move into logistics began in 2018 with Marco Riva, whose experience included Blackstone’s European logistics business Logicor. They started executing the strategy in Italy and Spain before extending it across other markets. Crossbay launched publicly in May 2020. Its focus was the warehouse close enough to a city to serve the people who live there.

In the language of delivery, this is the last mile. It sounds like a modest distance. In property, it can be a difficult place to find space. Existing urban areas offer limited opportunities to add buildings, while distributors need access to customers. A warehouse’s position on the map can matter as much as its size.

The assets also arrive in awkward portions. A pension fund seeking a substantial property allocation cannot necessarily spend its time negotiating separately with every small warehouse owner. Crossbay’s proposition was to undertake that work, buying individual properties and bringing them together under a specialist organisation. Local acquisition teams and asset managers connected the individual buildings to the wider portfolio.

The first Crossbay fund raised €550 million in equity commitments. By its 2022 sale, the portfolio stretched through Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, France, Germany, Belgium and Poland. The buildings were 95 percent occupied. About 85 percent could serve areas of more than a million people within roughly half an hour. Those figures give the phrase “urban logistics” a practical meaning.

Meijer described the model as one the business wanted to repeat. The sale established that there was a buyer for the assembled portfolio. It also made the next task fairly clear: find more buildings, maintain the local organisation and persuade investors that the process could be repeated under different market conditions.

A large fund built from small conversations

Crossbay II closed in the final quarter of 2024 with €660 million in equity commitments, 20 percent more than its predecessor. Including debt financing, its announced investment capacity exceeded €1.5 billion. Equity commitments, borrowing capacity and a portfolio’s eventual sale price measure different things; treating them separately gives a clearer view of the business.

The investor group included institutions and family offices from Europe, Asia and the United States. Meijer explained the fundraise in terms of investor demand for specialist managers pursuing tightly defined opportunities. He also acknowledged continuing uncertainty. After years of diversified investing, the firm was making a more specific offer: a particular type of building, in particular urban markets, acquired by people who knew those places.

The people doing the buying are a recurring subject when Meijer discusses Crossbay. In 2025, after MARK received PERE’s Logistics Investor of the Year award, he directed attention to the teams working in each country. Their relationships and knowledge made off-market opportunities accessible. A European investment strategy, in this account, consists of many very local conversations.

There is a personal detail that fits the geography: Meijer speaks six languages. His LinkedIn profile lists Dutch, English, French, Spanish, Italian and German. That does not make every negotiation straightforward. It does suggest why the gap between a central investment plan and a conversation in an individual market would be familiar territory.

The city still has a front door

Warehouses have not displaced his interest in the places people visit. In a 2022 podcast conversation, Meijer discussed his love of art, cities and architecture. MARK’s redevelopment work gives those interests a physical setting. At Borough Yards, near London’s Borough Market, Victorian railway arches became part of a district of shops, restaurants, offices and a cinema, designed with SPPARC.

The site’s complications helped define its appeal. Its position between the market and the Thames supplied passing visitors; its heritage spaces offered a character that a conventional development could hardly order from a catalogue. The commercial task was to make those advantages work together. Restaurant tables and cinema seats gave people reasons to remain in the area.

Across London, The Whiteley involved another version of the problem. MARK and C C Land partnered on the redevelopment, with Foster + Partners designing the scheme. The plan brought homes, hotel accommodation, shops and restaurants into the former shopping centre. Meijer’s interest extended beyond the building to the surrounding Queensway neighbourhood.

There is a human footnote to the long project. Developer Alex Michelin remembered a lunch with Meijer in late 2018 to celebrate the Whiteleys purchase. He described it as the beginning of a seven-year journey together. Property announcements tend to compress time into a completion date. A remembered lunch restores a little of the waiting, negotiation and continued partnership that sit between acquisition and delivery.

What remains after the name changes

Meyer Bergman became MARK in 2020. By then, the business had already moved beyond its retail identity; the new name followed a change in its activity. In his 2025 People Property Place conversation, Meijer still wanted to do more urban mixed-use work, while recognising the difficulty of raising money for it. His enthusiasm for a place and the availability of capital were separate questions.

By September 2026, he was discussing a market that he believed had largely completed its repricing, alongside his view that investors would demand more than strategies dependent on leverage and changing yields. That emphasis brings the story back to the work within a property business: finding assets, improving them and assembling something another owner values.

Meijer’s portfolio of interests runs from the shop window to the loading bay. Each serves a different moment in city life. The connection lies in paying attention to how a place works, who needs it and what patient ownership can change. At Burlington Arcade, the task involved luxury retailers. Elsewhere, it involves a delivery van finding the right door.