Banks in Europe are expecting a slow recovery in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and while they forecast that hotel and retail loan portfolios will likely be hit more considerably than office and other real estate asset classes, the majority of them believes that the impairment will be in the range of a few percentage points up to 10% in total. These are some of the early findings from the COVID-specific section of this year's edition of KPMG's Property Lending Barometer, due to be published in autumn 2020.

Industrial property specialist Gazeley announced that it is adopting the GLP brand name following its acquisition by the global investment manager in 2017. In addition, GLP announces that it has closed on the acquisition of Goodman Group’s Central and Eastern European logistics real estate portfolio.

CEE’s highly skilled and lower cost workforce, its well-established track record and competitiveness in industrial production coupled with the fact that the region has enabled manufacturers to generate higher levels of economic output at disproportionately lower operating costs is a compelling case for continued FDI into the region, according to Colliers International.

As the manufacturing sector begins to reopen around the world, new trends are emerging in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, according to new research by Cushman & Wakefield.

Colliers expects that a fair amount of market activity in 2020 will come from lease renegotiations and renewals as opposed to new and pre-lease transactions and that we might record more sub-leases being offered if companies need to downsize. Tenant covenants will receive additional scrutiny by landlords, banks and investors in order to limit risk to a sustainable income. Colliers launched the ExCEEding Borders Office Snapshot for the 14 CEE capital cities and summarised the key Q1 2020 market results with year on year comparison.

Shops, restaurants and hotels have opened again in nearly all of the markets in which the listed real estate investment company S Immo AG operates. Romania was the last to reopen, as the strict restrictions remained in place significantly longer there. However, hotels have been operating without restrictions and all shops have been open here as well since Monday, 15 June 2020. T

New Work, a CEE-based flexible office space provider, launches its Series C capital increase. Its business focus will be on the development of services that address the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Supervisory Board of Immofinanz extended the Executive Board appointments for COO Dietmar Reindl and CFO Stefan Schönauer for a period of five years as of 1 May 2021, i.e. to 30 April 2026. The composition of the Executive Board remains unchanged with Ronny Pecik (CEO), Dietmar Reindl (COO) and Stefan Schönauer (CFO).

In Q1 2020, S Immo’s rental income rose by around 10% in annual comparison to €31.1 million (Q1 2019: €28.4 million). The FFO I – a key figure for operating performance – advanced by 27.8% to €13.8 million (Q1 2019: €10.8 million). At the same time, the results on property valuation turned negative to reach minus €31.5 million in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic (Q1 2019: plus €9.9 million). This corresponds to around 1.3% of the IFRS real estate assets. All in all, the company saw a loss for the period of €21.4 million as of 31 March 2020 (Q1 2019: profit for the period of €15.1m million).

As of 29 May, CPI Property Group collected 76% of rents in April 2020. The company published unaudited financial results for the first quarter of 2020.