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.

Property Forum is pleased to announce it is partnering with Unissu, the world’s PropTech marketplace, to launch Connect, the global real estate equivalent of TED Talks. Budapest will be one of the 15 cities globally where hand-picked speakers will record their speeches for a global audience.

The top 40 construction companies operating in Poland posted a record aggregate revenue in 2018, breaking the previous revenue high set in 2011. Besides an improved volume of work, the revenue hike was also largely driven by rising prices of building materials and labour.

In Q3 2019, the total office stock in Prague reached 3.59 million sqm, according to Colliers International. Completions include two new and one refurbished property: Dock In Three in Prague 8 (16,000 sqm), Argentinská Office Building in Prague 7 (5,800 sqm) and the refurbished Life Building C in Prague 4 (11,100 sqm).