Investment into the European logistics real estate market remained strong in Q1 2022 and experienced a y-o-y growth of 19.6%. The growth of 28% above the five years average has experienced the leased warehouse space. The biggest change occupiers anticipate as a result of the pandemic is the shortening, or reshoring, of supply chains to mitigate risk. Also, the war in Ukraine and China´s lockdowns has driven the demand to record levels, indicates Savills in their last European Logistics Outlook published today.

In line with the growing popularity of flexible and hybrid work models, many companies are relocating, changing size and trying to re-fitting their offices. This could be one of the reasons why Prague placed second in the CEE region in terms of the price of fitting out an office. Nevertheless, the key reasons are the tightening supply chain and challenges around labour, which are set to continue well in 2022 and beyond. The average costs per sqm in Prague are currently €1,037, which is half of what it is in top German cities or in the UK where the median cost exceeded €2,000, Cushman & Wakefield presents in their report.

UnicreditBank Czech Republic & Slovakia and Demaco have signed a long-term loan agreement together for funding the project in Northern Moravia. Demaco informed about the contract on its LinkedIn page.

Adventum Group’s largest deal to date – a portfolio of 18 retail parks anchored by Tesco across Hungary and the Czech Republic with a GLA of 360,000 sqm let to over 900 tenants – has come to a successful completion and with this transaction Adventum’s assets under management has reached €1 billion.

Codrin Matei, Managing Partner, Head of Capital Markets at Crosspoint Real Estate spoke to Property Forum about the real estate asset classes that can attract new foreign investors and the high level of capital available for innovative projects. The agency has been generating growing revenues in the residential sector and expects business to grow in all commercial segments this year.

Austrian real estate group Supernova has added four MAX shopping malls to its portfolio of eleven OBI supermarkets in Slovakia. The transaction, without mentioning the price, was reported by the news website reality.trend.sk.

The retail market in Romania is set to expand by more than 500,000 sqm in the next four years, with 10 of the projects in the pipeline each having more than 10,000 sqm, according to  Cushman & Wakefield Echinox. 

Green certificates are becoming the norm in CEE but words like 'excellent' or 'platinum' don't always provide enough information about a building's overall environmental impact. Developers, architects and advisors were discussing the real cases of ESG principles` implementation during a panel at the European ESG Property Forum conference in Warsaw, moderated by Oana Stamatin, ESG Chief Officer at Colliers.

There are strange dances around the reconstruction of the baroque Savarin Palace in the centre of Prague. The CZK 10 billion project has been approved by the city's conservationists and city councillors and the first phase of the project is already underway, according to the builders. However, the Ministry of Culture has now rejected the project, saying it would threaten the city's conservation area, the Czech News Agency (ČTK) reports. Therefore, Culture Minister Martin Baxa has a request on his desk from the construction company Crestyl to review the decision of his officials, as company spokesman Ondřej Micka confirmed to Property Forum today.

Vantage Data Centers, a global provider of hyperscale data centre campuses, announced that two greenfield campuses in Berlin and Warsaw are now operational. The opening of a Warsaw campus marks the company’s first facility in Poland, while the development in Berlin marks the company’s second campus in Germany. Among Vantage’s portfolio of nine campuses in EMEA, five of them are now operational (Berlin I, Warsaw, Frankfurt I, Zurich and Cardiff).