ARTICLES LABELLED WITH TAG report

Experts of the international investors’ panel at SEE Property Forum 2020, a hybrid event organised by Property Forum and RICS, agreed that Romania’s property investment market has matured a lot in recent years but the lack of liquidity is still an issue. They also confirmed that COVID-19 makes it difficult to forecast the future direction of the market and it makes certain market players, especially banks, more cautious.

The impacts of COVID-19 are becoming visible on Prague’s office market with a rapid decrease of net demand and the postponement of several completions of new office projects. At the same time, the share of sublease deals within the total take-up increased from around 1% in previous quarters to 7%. The Prague Research Forum announced the office market figures for the third quarter of 2020.

Demand in Q1-Q3 2020 was 35% lower on Warsaw’s office market than in the corresponding period last year, while another trend is a growing volume of office space available for sublease.  JLL summarised the Warsaw office market at the end of Q3 2020.

Total demand on the Budapest industrial/logistics market amounted to 460,000 sqm in Q1-Q3 2020. The vacancy rate at the end of Q3 2020 stood at 2.3% following a 0.21 pps decline y-o-y. The Budapest Research Forum published its quarterly industrial/logistics market analysis

The share of internet sales has returned to near pre-pandemic levels. At the same time, Polish customers are more willing than before to turn to convenience shopping in smaller retail formats. JLL summarised conditions on Poland's retail market at the end of Q3 2020.

It’s at last becoming possible to assess the consequences for Croatia’s construction sector of the country’s July 2020 elections. Jockeying for governmental positions, COVID-19- and tourism-season-related priorities and other pressing matters prevented the new Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) led government from moving on its larger agenda until recently. Now, though, the political picture, and the impact of the elections on Croatia’s construction sector, is getting clearer, according to a report by the Eastern European Construction Forecasting Association.

Data centres are becoming an important segment of commercial real estate and the COVID-19 pandemic turned out to be an impulse for its accelerated growth. There are currently 115 data centres in Poland, of which the highest number is located in Warsaw (35), Katowice and Kraków (13 each). Axi Immo anticipates the market to develop further, especially following the decision by IT giants Google and Microsoft to add Warsaw to their list of global cloud regions, with a pledged investment of $2 billion and $1 billion respectively over the coming years. Axi Immo experts have prepared a report on the Polish data centre market, its requirements and specific features.

Budapest’s office vacancy rate has increased to 8.1% in Q3 2020, representing an increase of 2.2 pps year-on-year. 106 lease agreements were concluded during the quarter and the number of signed transactions dropped by 25% compared to the same quarter of 2019, according to BRF’s latest figures.

According to Savills’ latest research, Europe will see an additional 11.6 million sqm of warehouse demand due to the manufacturing sector by the end of 2022, based on Capital Economics forecasts data.

As of the end of Q3 2020, €3.9 billion have been transacted on Poland’s property market since the beginning of the year. The result is slightly lower than in the years 2018 and 2019, however, it is worth noting that despite the investors’ “wait and see” strategy at the beginning of COVID-19 pandemic, the outcome is still impressive. As many investors are returning to transactions which were put aside, multiple deals should be closed within the last quarter of the year which has always been a period of intense activity on the market, according to a report by Avison Young.