Cushman & Wakefield selected Budapest as the location of their Portfolio Services Centre (PSC) solution. The new 1,300 sqm PSC is located in the Studium Office Building, close to Corvinus University and many cultural venues and sights. The team is being led by Byron Tudor who has joined from Goldman Sachs International.

The ParkLake shopping mall in Bucharest, developed by a joint venture of Sonae Sierra and Caelum Development, has received a BREEAM certification with a rating of ‘Excellent’.

Goodman has begun construction of a modern warehouse of over 32,000 sqm for BMW Group in Świecko, Poland. The facility will be a logistics centre for replacement parts to serve the Polish and East German market. It will be Goodman’s first development for BMW Group in Poland, and its fourth project for the automotive giant in Continental Europe.

Polish developer MLP Group will build a new logistics park in Romania. The development project will be executed near Bucharest on an 18.8 ha plot of land. The target total area of this complex of facilities will be approx. 80,000 square meters of modern warehousing space.

Investment flows into the CEE-6 region’s commercial real estate markets rose 12% y-o-y in the first nine months of 2017. The €7.6 billion closed deal total coupled with a still full pipeline of deals under consideration suggests that the annual cycle high of €12.2 billion invested last year is likely to be matched or overhauled. Substantial growth in Czech and Bulgarian volumes were the drivers of the momentum in the January-September 2017 period, says Colliers International in its latest report.

The construction of building H, the eighth element of Bonarka for Business (B4B), an office complex in Krakow, has recently started. At completion, the office building will provide approx. 10,000 sqm GLA and 209 parking spaces for the tenants, extending the B4B complex to a total of 75,000 GLA. Meanwhile, GlobalLogic, an existing tenant in B4B since 2016, signed a lease agreement for an additional 1,274 sqm GLA.

Demand on Romania's industrial and logistics market reached 456,000 square meters in the first nine months of 2017, close to the level recorded for the whole last year when it cumulated 463,000 square meters, according to JLL:

Albanian company Balfin Group has acquired a 155 000 sqm plot of land, 1.5 km from the centre of Skopje. The company plans to develop the first mixed-used real-estate development project in excess of 250,000 sqm gross build area, estimated to be largest private investment of this type in Macedonia. The development plans include a new 45 000 sqm gross leasable area shopping mall, residential block and an office park. The overall total investment of the company is planned to be circa €180 million over a time-span of 5-7 years, with €100 million investment in first phase, creating thousands of new jobs and opportunities. The company states that the shopping mall will be developed first, and the apartments and office towers over the next 5-7 years.

CTP Group, Allianz Group and ING Bank have signed a new €160 million syndicate loan for the financing of a portfolio of industrial properties in the Czech Republic. This loan serves both to refinance existing loans from a group of CEE banks and to finance new projects which have been completed in 2017. The refinancing with Allianz and ING is part of CTP´s ongoing strategy to extend its network of financing partners, including seeking partners outside the CEE region.

The Bulgarian property market is booming with the total transaction volume expected to exceed €1 billion in 2017. The outlook for the future is highly positive: strong demand, underpinned by solid economic growth, encourages developers to start new projects in all segments of the market.