Travel restrictions and the inability to meet in person have caused a lot of headache for many market players but in many cases, it also provided certain types of investors with an advantage. Pavel Streblov, Business Director at Penta Real Estate talked to Property Forum about the company’s development and investment strategy and shared his expectations for the year ahead.

Czech-Dutch investment company Fidurock has obtained a building permit for the reconstruction of an apartment building in Brno.

Swedish company Heimstaden, the third-largest provider of rental housing in Europe, continues its investments in housing in the Czech Republic. The company, which bought Residomo with 42,500 apartments mainly in the Moravian-Silesian Region last year, is now expanding its portfolio with a €22.7 million acquisition in Plzeň from Czech developer Daramis.  The new assets include 226 flats and 5 non-residential premises.

Despite the difficulties caused by COVID-19, the year 2020 was a turning point, in a positive sense, for most Czech Proptech companies. as the pandemic situation created strong pressure to automate and digitize processes using modern technologies. These technologies include machine reading, artificial intelligence or the Internet of Things. Many companies have expanded to foreign markets, where Czech solutions for residential and commercial development are receiving positive responses. The Czech-Slovak Association of PropTech Companies has received feedback from 5 progressive companies.

Czech real estate consultancy 108 Agency has published the first edition of an original project that provides an overall summary of the Czech industrial real estate market from the perspective of individual development companies and owners.

Passerinvest Group has sold the Nová Karolina Park office building in the centre of Ostrava. The new owner is locally based investment group RT TORAX Group.

Trei Real Estate’s development portfolio grew by 33 percent to €1.2 billion in 2020 from €900 million in 2019. The sum total breaks down into €1.0 billion in residential real estate and c. €200 million in retail real estate. The proprietary portfolio of Trei maintained its total of c. €1.2 billion and it includes 349 assets.

Czech development group Horizon has a record year behind it, despite the uncertainty and difficult conditions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, the company's total revenue from the sale of 337 units in five different projects reached €100 million (CZK 2.7 billion). Horizon plans to build around a thousand more units this year and will put another 550 apartments on sale.

Real estate investment manager Garbe Institutional Capital, headquartered in Hamburg (Germany), is expanding into Central and Eastern Europe. Managing and developing retail, office and residential real estate assets, the company will initially focus on the Polish and Czech markets. With its commitment to the CEE region, Garbe Institutional Capital provides German institutional investors with access to high-quality real estate investments in economically prospering metropolitan areas in the eastern part of the European Union. The new CEE business is based in Prague and headed by Ben Maudling as Managing Director, Head of CEE.

The Arete Group of investment funds completed the entire transaction and transferred ownership of the complete portfolio of the Arete Invest CEE II subfund in the amount of €113.2 million (CZK 3 billion) to Cromwell European REIT (CEREIT) a publicly-traded real estate investment trust listed on the Singapore Stock Exchange.