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The office market in Bucharest continues to grow, with 124,000 of modern office space delivered in the first nine months of the year ​​388,000 sqm more in the pipeline, according to Cushman & Wakefield Echinox. The commercial stock of office buildings in Bucharest reaches about 2.9 million square meters with an additional 150,000 sqm of owner-occupied stock.

The number of state-owned companies relying on modern office space is on the rise, reveals Savills. The public sector and state-owned firms more than doubled their share in office take-up in Warsaw in Q1-Q3 2020 compared to last year. What’s more, Savills estimates that negotiations are pending for more than the amount of office space leased by this sector in the nine months to September 2020.

In previous quarters the analysts of the EBI Construction Activity Report broadly discussed the negative effects of the pandemic on Hungary’s construction industry. The latest figures also suggest that there is still no improvement in the sector after a weak first half of the year.

238,300 sqm of office space was delivered to the Warsaw office market in the first three quarters of 2020, reveals Cushman & Wakefield. Due to the worsening sentiment of market participants, prime headline rents edged down by €0.25/sqm/month, standing at €23.75/sqm/month in the centre and at €14.75/sqm/month in non-central locations.

During Q3 2020, gross take-up on the Czech industrial market reached 289,400 sqm which is a decrease of 21% year-on-year. Still, the vacancy rate decreased over the quarter. The Industrial Research Forum announced the industrial market figures for Q3 2020.

While in Poland over 20% of investors are favouring projects that have high ESG-related ratings (which is fourth highest figure globally), Hungary and the Czech Republic are the two countries with the highest share (over 40%) of respondents saying that ESG considerations play no role when they evaluate projects, according to the latest results of the RICS Global Commercial Property Monitor.

Poland’s commercial property investment volume surpassed €4 billion in the January-September period of 2020, down by 12.4% on the same period in 2019. Logistics accounted for nearly half of the investment activity while offices made up 38% of the transaction volume in Q1-Q3 2020, according to Cushman & Wakefield.

During the first nine months of 2020, developers completed over 530,000 sqm of office space in Poland: 231,600 in Warsaw and 305,000 sqm in eight major regional markets (Kraków, Wrocław, Tricity, Poznań, Łódź, Katowice, Lublin and Szczecin). Due to the new supply and moderate demand, more than 1.2 million sqm of office space is now available. Axi Immo presented the latest data for the Polish office market as at the end of the third quarter of 2020.

As part of a new climate strategy, one of the leading German asset managers is also targeting net-zero emission portfolio by 2050 – German investment manager KGAL has committed to becoming a climate-neutral company by the beginning of 2021 by offsetting all greenhouse gas emissions connected to its operations. Emissions calculated per employee will be reduced by 5% annually during the next 10 years. It has also pledged to have a net-zero emission investment portfolio by 2050. The targets are set out in the company’s newly announced climate strategy.

According to the latest Savills research, Prague’s office real estate market is fairly priced despite some minor outward prime yield movement during the first half of the year. This broader continent-wide outward yield movement has helped push the average yield spread between prime European offices and Eurozone government bonds to 325 basis points, more than 100 bps above the historic average.