VGP has concluded a lease agreement with Pilulka Lékárny for 4,479 sqm of warehouse space in the newly completed hall "I" in VGP Park Olomouc. The company is one of the largest pharmaceutical and pharmacy groups in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The warehouses in Olomouc will be used for supplying customers in several regions: Brno, Ostrava, Olomouc and Prostějov. The new premises have been implemented in the BREEAM Very Good green certification.

Ryan Wray, Managing Director and Principal at Avison Young, Czech Republic, talked to Property Forum about the perils of today’s macroeconomic conditions investors may reckon with in their decision-making and looked at possible scenarios and working strategies for office occupiers in the Czech office market.

Brno's office stock reached 635,900 sqm in the first half of 2022 and 75,300 sqm is being built there. At the same time, Ostrava's office stock has 219,100 sqm and builts 21,000 sqm of offices. None of these regional metropolises had finished a new office building in the first half of this year. In both localities, prime rents increased reflecting the general pressure on prices in new developments, reports the Regional Research Forum.

The fears of a recession are likely to cool down the red-hot real estate market in CEE countries, Erste specialists expect. According to them, this will be influenced mainly by surging inflation, the cost of credit and cooling down of the borrowing, and shrinking of the disposable household income which will also worsen the borrowing appetite in the coming periods. There is a change in the respondent’s behaviour too. Whereas respondents from Poland, Hungary and Croatia are open to buying or building a house, Czechs, Slovaks and Slovenians are less inclined to do so, say Erste experts in their recent special report.

In Q2 2022, Prague's current office space volume reached 3,75 million sqm and 215,700 sqm is under construction. It is expected that the construction volume will increase by 74,000 sqm of office space by the end of 2022. Rents grew by 18% y-o-y and further growth in coming periods is also expected, JLL's Prague Office Market Q2 report says.

The Czech state continues to unsuccessfully trying to sell Prague's functionalist Broadway Palace from the 1930s. The Office for Representation of the State in Property Matters (ÚZSVM) offered it for the third time in an electronic auction, this time with a starting price of CZK 1.05 billion (€43.153 million), but no one took part in the auction, a spokeswoman for the office told the Czech News Agency.

After two years of the pandemic, every fourth woman is considering leaving the labour market, says a study by the McKinsey Global Institute. According to Colliers, this can be prevented and easily reversed by the employer by adjusting the working environment and conditions or by investing in the employee's reskilling. It is necessary to consider as such an exodus of women from the group of productive employees would weaken the Czech labour market.

Investment group DRFG has started to build a new apartment complex in Mladá Boleslav in Michalovice. As part of the project, called Green, an apartment building with more than a hundred apartments, garages and a large garden with a water reservoir will be built within two years. The market value of the project is CZK 634.6 million (€25.9 million), according to DRFG spokeswoman Monika Brichtová.

Czech investment and development group Trigema has bought a 51% stake in CenovaMapa.org, the market leader in online real estate valuation. Its founder, Hyposervis, retains 49% of the company. Following the acquisition, the parties did not disclose the amount. The newly created real estate data provider has been renamed Dataligence.

The Czech real estate investment volume reached €1.15 billion in the first half of 2022. This was a 60% increase and was mainly led by domestic investors who acquired properties worth more than €607 million. Even the number of transactions in Q2 surpassed Q1 of this year. Domestic buyers were involved in 11 of the 13 transactions in Q2, so the share of the domestic capital increased in total volume to 68%, Savills reported.