According to a report published by Newmark Polska, occupier activity in Poland’s regional city office markets remains stable, but tenants are increasingly shifting their focus towards making efficient use of office space and looking for better quality offices.

There are more and more vacant office spaces on the regional markets in Poland. In Warsaw, despite the decline in demand, the availability of offices is getting smaller, says Walter Herz. 

Gross demand for office spaces in Bucharest hovered around 164,000 sqm in the first half of 2023, up by 22% compared to the same period of last year, while deliveries of new office buildings will remain on a downward trend by year-end, according to data from iO Partners. 

The Academia office building in downtown Budapest has undergone complete renovation and modernization. The building will offer 12,500 sqm of office space from the first week of August. The complex has obtained the WiredScore-Gold certification and soon it will boast additional certifications, such as BREEAM, WELL and Access4you.

One year after construction began, the rough construction of one of the future A1 office building in Prague's Rohan City project has been completed. Upon completion, the building will house the headquarters of Sekyra Group, the developer of the Rohan City project, among others. It is being built on a brownfield site on Rohanský island in Prague 8, which has been unused for many years.

Czech investment group Enern and Lincoln Property Company, an American company operating in the European market including Slovakia, have started construction of a new office project in Warsaw called The FORM. The project was purchased by the new owners in 2021 from Penta Real Estate. Its financing includes recently issued bonds worth €30 million with an annual coupon of six and a half percent, which are managed and secured by J&T Bank. The bonds are listed and traded on the Bratislava Stock Exchange, trend.sk reports.

The Warsaw office market is seeing signs of upcoming renewed development activity, says Savills. Three new office buildings were delivered in the first half of 2023, but a significant increase in new supply is not expected until 2025.

The Polish Chamber of Commercial Real Estate (PINK) has published figures summarizing office market in eight major regional markets in Poland (Kraków, Wrocław, the Tri-City, Katowice, Poznań, Łódź, Lublin, Szczecin) for Q2 2023. The data is sourced from advisory companies from the commercial real estate sector (Axi Immo, BNP Paribas Real Estate, CBRE, Colliers, Cushman & Wakefield, JLL, Knight Frank, Newmark Polska, Savills) and includes information on existing modern office stock, new completions, take-up volumes and vacancy rates.

Desk sharing is beginning to take root in Czech offices. Not only does it make office space usage more efficient, but it also offers employees greater comfort. In fact, companies usually invest up to half as much in standard, individual workstations as they would in traditional office layouts, reports Colliers.

The vacancy rate has climbed again in the second quarter on Budapest's struggling office market, reaching 12.6% after 12.2% in the previous quarter. Total demand reached 119,890 sqm in Q2 2023, which is 56% higher than the value registered in the previous quarter, the Budapest Research Forum reports.