Newly approved building regulations in Slovakia will significantly reduce the endless waiting for building permits. Thanks to advanced digitalisation, the individual processes and the timeframes for their execution are shortened. Builders will thus be able to calculate the capital invested and the entire work schedule more accurately. Therefore, a new Office for Spatial Planning and Construction is being established as a central state administration body, as well as a specialised construction office for the so-called EIA of construction at the Ministry of the Environment, webnoviny.sk informs.

The Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic has decided on a one-year postponement of the effectiveness of part of the Construction Act. Instead of the planned central construction office, which the previous government of Andrej Babiš wanted, they are preparing the digitalisation of the process, the Czech Press Agency reports.

The Hungarian construction industry started off this year with an exceptionally high Activity Start indicator: nearly HUF 1,300 billion worth of construction works started in Q1 2022. The Activity Start of EBI Construction Activity Report in the first quarter is a new record (construction works have never started in such a high value in one quarter) and exceeded the level of Q2 2021 (the highest so far) by almost 37%. Yet, this spike is mainly thanks to the launch of two major infrastructure projects, according to the EBI Construction Activity Report, prepared by Buildecon, Eltinga (creation of indicators and development of algorithms for aggregation) and iBuild (project research and project database).

According to Yasen Georgiev from EPI, EECFA Bulgaria, like elsewhere in the EECFA countries that are not directly impacted by the war in Ukraine, the construction market in Bulgaria entered a period of an increasing unpredictability. What stands behind is an interplay between domestic and external factors.

New laws on spatial planning and construction will replace the nearly half-century-old 1976 Construction Act in Slovakia. The National Council of the Slovak Republic approved them on Wednesday with a large number of changes compared to the original form, along with a related amendment to the Competence Act, reports webnoviny.sk.

Serbia’s construction market was booming when the economic and geopolitical situation changed, so the complicating circumstances in the world are stifling the potential growth and slowing down the ongoing recovery. Inflationary pressures have exploded with the start of the war in Ukraine and the effects of the current crisis are still unforeseeable, writes Dejan Krajinović from Beobuild Core d.o.o. for EECFA Serbia.

The latest report from research firm Spectis indicates that following a strong start to the year, the outlook for the construction sector over the coming months of 2022 is now less bright. The expected slowdown can be indirectly caused by the ongoing war in Ukraine, which only aggravates the problems the market has been facing previously, such as soaring prices of raw materials, building materials, and energy sources or the shortage of labour.

For Croatia, as for other EECFA countries, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been both a supply shock and a demand shock. And many of the elements of these shocks are the same for Croatia as for other EECFA countries. On the supply side, energy costs are rising as are the costs of construction materials and of construction finance. Supply chains and labour markets have also been disrupted. On the demand side, inflation has cut into consumers’ real disposable income, consumer confidence has been shaken as a result and finance for real estate purchases has become more expensive, says Michael Glazer, SEE Regional Advisor at EECFA Croatia.

The Prague City Council plans to start building hundreds of council flats for rent in the coming years. The municipality wants to address the deepening housing affordability crisis in this way, E15.cz reports.

Inspired by its parent company, UBM Development Czechia wants to use more ecological elements in its future construction in the Czech Republic and thus strengthen the trend of sustainable construction. One of them is eco-friendly wooden structures, the company announced today.