Increase in flexible working patterns brought on by the Covid pandemic has had a positive influence on our ability to juggle these two competing pulls on our time and focus, says Clare Sheils, Managing Director of CBRE in the Czech Republic. She talked to Property Forum about market expectations, the ongoing energy crisis and being a woman in top management in real estate.

CBRE has appointed Daniel Bienias as the new Managing Director of the CEE region. He will take over this role from Andreas Ridder who has been successfully building CBRE’s presence in the region for the last 20 years. Andreas will remain in his position as Managing Director, CBRE Austria.

The entire Revolucija office building, developed by Granit Invest, with more than 10,000 square meters of office, retail and garage space, was leased to one company as a tenant, which was advised by CBRE South Eastern Europe.

How will the current macroeconomic situation affect investment activity and further development within individual sectors, from offices to industrial and logistics complexes to retail real estate? All this is shown in CBRE's latest analysis of the Czech commercial real estate market, which also provides an updated outlook for 2023.

Interest in office space in Prague is not slowing down. Office demand is growing by tens of percents year-on-year, the vacancy rate is slightly decreasing and over 190,000 sqm is under construction, according to the latest office market analysis for Q3 2022 by the Prague Research Forum.

The Romanian self-storage market has reached a leasable area of 25,000 sqm in 2022, which was just 0.2% of the total European market, according to real estate consultancy CBRE.  

CBRE has analysed the Czech commercial real estate market in detail and estimates that the next six months of this year will be as strong as the first six months of the year, which hit the €1.15 billion mark. By the end of the year, according to CBRE, the €2 billion level should be reached, similar to last year and the year before.

The boundary between online and offline shopping is becoming increasingly vague. There is an evident retail trade trend toward the omnichannel, i.e. combining various sales channels tailored to the consumer's individual needs. This requires the development of e-commerce which has significantly accelerated recently. In the last 5 years, the share of online sales in Central and Eastern Europe grew by 9 pps to 15%, and in 4 years' time is bound to amount to 20%, according to CBRE's forecasts. Poland and Czechia are leaders in terms of online shopping growth in the region. E-commerce's market share in these countries in 2026 may be as high as almost a quarter.

Since February this year, Natalia Wenzławska, who took the position of Head of Marketing, is responsible for marketing and communication at CBRE in Poland. She will lead a team of a dozen or so people, whose tasks will focus on the implementation of the company's overall communication strategy.

As of summer 2022, leasing activity in the Kyiv office market was near a standstill and primarily driven by office optimization, as well as lease renewals and renegotiations of existing leases, according to the latest research of CBRE Ukraine. Whereas, as of the beginning of June, we observed a slight recovery in the level of office occupancy by employees who continued to work or who returned to Kyiv. Thus, typical office attendance among corporate occupiers was ca. 10% with many tenants in IT, high tech & telecommunications, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, agriculture, FMCG and industrial sectors planning to increase occupancy to 15%.