According to the forecast of EECFA, the Romanian construction industry is poised to grow in both 2022 and 2023. The main drivers of growth vary, including low interest rates and excess liquidity that boost the residential subsector or the use of EU 2014-2020 cohesion funds to help boost civil engineering, writes Dr Sebastian Sipos-Gug from Ebuild srl / EECFA Romania.

Bogdan Doicescu, Development Director and Executive Board Member at Bog’Art, spoke with Property Forum about the company’s construction pipeline and the outlook of the real estate market in Romania going into 2022.

Romania is expected to see only moderate growth on the horizon. Serbia, having recorded the biggest expansion of almost 100% in the 2014-2020 period, is foreseen to plateau in the upcoming years, according to the Eastern European Construction Forecasting Association’s 2021 Winter Construction Forecast Report.

After a significant expansion in Q2 2021, the value of started construction works in the Hungarian construction industry marked a major drop between July and September. Yet overall, the Activity Start indicator remained high for Q3 2021 due to the exceptionally good second quarter, according to the EBI Construction Activity Report.

Croatia’s remarkable recovery from the brutal impact that the COVID-19 epidemic had on the country in 2020 is, like its construction boom, both real and smoke and mirrors, both temporary and long-term, according to Michael Glazer (SEE Regional Advisors) and Tatjana Halapija (Nada Projekt), the Eastern European Construction Forecasting Association’s members in Croatia.

The shortage of skilled workers and engineers is the biggest obstacle to the business activities of design and construction enterprises, a market survey of the National Federation of Hungarian Building Contractors (ÉVOSZ) finds. While the number of people employed in the construction industry is growing each year, the number of vacancies is dropping rapidly, indicating that the labour supply is unable to keep pace with the development of the industry. The federation has therefore initiated a programme to call industry professionals working abroad home.

According to the UK analyst of Euroconstruct, Harvir Dhillon, material shortages have plagued the construction industry over the past few months. In tandem with rising inflation, global construction activity has experienced a supply-side shock that looks set to persist well into 2022. Disruption in the supply chain has been driven by a number of factors, from the constrained capacity of sawmills and steel mills to environmental factors such as the forest fires seen in major timber exporters like the United States and Sweden, to name but a few.

After a relative stagnation in previous quarters, Q2 2021 saw a considerable expansion in the Activity Start indicator of the EBI Construction Activity Report. It was the first three months of 2018 last that witnessed a higher value of construction works to start in a quarter. In H1 2021, projects entered the construction phase on a total of HUF 1,398 billion, marking a significant increase of 20% and 18%, respectively, against the same period of the previous two years.

According to the Czech analyst of Euroconstruct, David Frič, Czech construction certainly did not evade the crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and the industry fell by 3.6% in 2020 and is unlikely to return to pre-pandemic levels in the next two years.

The growth potential of the Polish construction market will remain significant through 2026 on the back of the continuation of ambitious road and railway infrastructure projects, the required power transformation of the Polish economy and the steadily robust performance of the residential construction sector. A vast majority of projects underway or planned to implemented are located in the six most economically advanced regions, which jointly account for two-thirds of the construction market’s value.