Arcadis, an international consultancy company focused on building industry, environment and sustainable growth, summarised the current development on the Czech industrial property market in the context of the second wave of coronavirus pandemic.
Speculative construction partly continues
According to the Industrial Research Forum 372,600 sqm of modern warehouses and production premises, 35% of which is on a purely speculative basis, were under construction in the third quarter of 2020. The location that is on the increase from the perspective of new development is the Ostrava region, where a number of large projects are and are going to be realised. The active developers on the Ostrava market include companies such as CTP, P3, GLP and Contera.
“Ostrava is the traditional industrial region offering sufficient qualified staff, needed infrastructure (airport, railway junction, motorways) and connection with the Slovak and Polish market. Saturated markets in Prague, Pilsen and in Brno soon are expected to be followed up by further development just in the Ostrava region. Planned construction concerns both development zones and brownfield revitalisation,” states Jan Podzimek, Head of Financial Institution Department at Arcadis Czech Republic.
Environmental certification as market standard
Besides office buildings, there are industrial buildings and parks that undergo environmental certification the most frequently. Not only assessment of sustainability has become the market standard but the Czech properties have proved successful at international level too.
“We are pleased that international environmental certification of industrial premises is market standard nowadays. In the Czech Republic, several projects have proved successful at the international level this year. The distribution centre of Real Digital, German online provider, built by Panattoni, obtained BREEAM Outstanding (90.68%) evaluation and became a world´s most sustainable industrial building according to the latest BREEAM 2016 New Construction standards. Next, CTP has had its portfolio of almost 300 buildings in six countries certified this year, which is the most extensive certification in Europe,” says Pavel Čermák, Managing Director of Arcadis Czech Republic.
“Every crisis produces acceleration and intensification of processes that have already been launched. The sustainability has been debated in our company since 2013 and also our clients striving in all aspects to implement approaches with the lowest possible environmental impact in their business activities, including CO2 emissions reduction, often talk about it. That is why we are moving the last projects, where we would normally aim at BREEAM Very Good certification, to the next stage of Excellent or Outstanding. So, the users of new industrial buildings set an example to users of residential properties, where the price element still prevails over the criterion of sustainability,” clarifies Pavel Sovička, CEO of Panattoni.
“CTP group as the market leader was ´green´ even before the ecological approach became a number one topic for the public. Thanks to that we can calculate energy incorporated in our buildings very well. Most laymen imagine a sustainable building as a building covered in green vegetation, however, for better understanding, we must go deeper in numbers and used technologies, material certificates of environmental impact, and others. When constructing our buildings we take maximum account of possible environmental impact, and the BREEAM certification, which we are going to complete in our entire portfolio this year is only formal confirmation in principle,“ adds Martin Vaidiš who is in charge of sustainable design at CTP.
Martin Vaidiš
Head of Design and Development
CTP
Operation automation and digitisation speed up
Labour shortage impeded domestic market of industrial and logistic real estate several years before coronavirus pandemic broke out. Many companies, specifically in the automotive industry and 3PL, resorted to automation and digitisation of their operation. Pandemic will incite and accelerate this trend and companies will have to restrict the movement of their staff in warehouses for health and safety reasons.
“Strong focus on the satisfaction of end customers with speed and reliability of delivery is one of the factors constantly raising automation rate in logistics. The current rate within the e-commerce segment increases the pressure on efficiency and capacity of operation, thus increases also the intensity of interest in automation. That is why we notice increased technical requirement for new premises intended for regular logistics allowing potential automation of operation in the future without the need of extensive renovation for such changes,” says Tomáš Buchal, Project Manager at Arcadis Czech Republic.
