Sustainability is top of the agenda this year at Davos as governments and businesses around the world are grappling with ways to combat climate change. Of the four global issues the World Economic Forum has said “clearly stand out as urgent and important” at the annual meeting in Switzerland, the first two are how to address environmental challenges harming our ecology and economy, and figuring out how to transform industries to achieve more sustainable business models. The built environment has a huge role to play in developing and implementing solutions, with technology, investment and robust governance central to success, according to the City Momentum Index report from JLL.

The volume of real estate investments in Romania exceeded €1 billion in 2019, totalling about €1.06 billion, 7% higher than the figure registered in 2018, according to CBRE Romania’s data. The volume reached in 2019 also marks a record of the last five years in terms of investment transactions on the Romanian real estate market.

Property Forum and RICS are looking for the most talented young professional of the Romanian real estate market. Nominations are accepted from every company active on the local market. The winner will be announced at SEE Property Forum in Bucharest, on 21 October 2020.

Savills World Research says that offices in core city markets around the world will be real estate investors’ focus in 2020, but with opportunities scarce and yields at record lows, many will be forced to look elsewhere. Alternative assets, such as student housing, multi-family, co-living and data centres, will therefore become increasingly mainstream. Globally, Savills says that securing income returns will remain the overarching theme for real estate investment in 2020.

Savills Investment Management prefers long-lease income streams in 2020 instead of value-add and opportunistic strategies that depend on economic and strong employment prospects. The international real estate investment manager published its market outlook.

According to JLL estimates, the value of the real estate investment transactions in Poland was a record-breaking €7.4 billion. This is a better result than 2018 (over €7.2 billion. The last 12 months were the best ever for the office segment, where the sales and acquisitions were worth more than €3.8 billion – over a billion euros more than the previous year.

In 2019, the Polish housing market experienced an acceleration and increase of projects in the rental and private student housing sectors. Poland is still on the radar of large foreign investors and some of them have been able to conclude spectacular deals. Although potential institutional buyers still aren’t able to purchase turn-key portfolios on an expected scale, and entering the market mostly means building new stock, the institutional rental sector is drawing more and more interest and will undoubtedly become a desired category of safe assets in 2020.

According to JLL data, office take-up in Warsaw grew by 270,000 sqm year-on-year in Q3 2019. At the same time, 185,000 sqm of space was delivered to the market during recent months. This means that the need for additional space exceeded new supply by as much as 85,000 sqm. This impressive performance has further fueled developer activity. 790,000 sqm of space is under construction, with a significant proportion of this total already being leased.

Major real estate developers continued to be active in Bucharest throughout 2019, providing the land needed for new projects consisting of over 6,000 apartments and 130,000 square meters of offices. Overall, in 2019, 24 major transactions were made in Bucharest with land intended for the development of residential, office or mixed projects, some of them having the potential to include a hotel component, according to Cushman & Wakefield Echinox.

This year has been a good year for the Romanian real estate market. The latest and last report of the year from Colliers International shows that the market has evolved better than expected in many segments.