GTC’s profit before tax and fair value adjustments increased to €21 million in Q3 2020 from €15 million in Q3 2019. For the January-September period, 2020’s results were slightly weaker at €52 million compared to the previous year’s €53 million.

According to Savills latest research, total property investment activity in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania for Q1-Q3 2020 was €7.6 billion, the third-highest volume on record, despite the global COVID-19 pandemic. Total investment volumes by year-end are forecast to surpass €10 billion, which would be in line with the five-year average.

The Romanian logistics market will have a record demand by the end of 2020, with a transactional volume exceeding the 700,000 square meters threshold, amid the accelerated development of e-commerce and the positioning of Bucharest as a regional logistics hub for a series of international retailers, according to Cushman & Wakefield Echinox.

Seven experts discussed investment and financing strategies for the new normal at the online edition of Prague Property Forum 2020. How has the investment market changed in the last 6-8 months? What major changes have been observed in investment and financing preferences? We summarised the highlights of the discussion, moderated by Luke Dawson (Colliers International).

C2H, the company that owns the Kara and Pietro Filipi fashion stores in the Czech Republic, has recently emptied its 58 stores in the country to prevent landlords it owes rent to from seizing its inventory as security for payments.

Hungary’s rental property market had an uneven month as prices were on average 5% lower than a year earlier according to the joint Rent Index of the Central Statistical Office (KSH) and real estate portal ingatlan.com. Rents were down 0.7% compared to August in Budapest in September, the last month of the season, while prices in other regions in Hungary remained level.

The office market in Bucharest continues to grow, with 124,000 of modern office space delivered in the first nine months of the year ​​388,000 sqm more in the pipeline, according to Cushman & Wakefield Echinox. The commercial stock of office buildings in Bucharest reaches about 2.9 million square meters with an additional 150,000 sqm of owner-occupied stock.

The number of state-owned companies relying on modern office space is on the rise, reveals Savills. The public sector and state-owned firms more than doubled their share in office take-up in Warsaw in Q1-Q3 2020 compared to last year. What’s more, Savills estimates that negotiations are pending for more than the amount of office space leased by this sector in the nine months to September 2020.

In previous quarters the analysts of the EBI Construction Activity Report broadly discussed the negative effects of the pandemic on Hungary’s construction industry. The latest figures also suggest that there is still no improvement in the sector after a weak first half of the year.

238,300 sqm of office space was delivered to the Warsaw office market in the first three quarters of 2020, reveals Cushman & Wakefield. Due to the worsening sentiment of market participants, prime headline rents edged down by €0.25/sqm/month, standing at €23.75/sqm/month in the centre and at €14.75/sqm/month in non-central locations.