The Vice-President of the European Investment Bank (EIB) Teresa Czerwińska and the acting Managing Director of EIB Global, Markus Berndt, spoke at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Lugano and shared the EIB’s views on Ukraine’s recovery. They reaffirmed the EU Bank's steadfast position on the importance and urgency of investing in Ukraine's European future, even as fighting continues across the country. Emphasising its support for the recovery plan presented at the conference, the EIB offered a new instrument, the EU-Ukraine Gateway Trust Fund. This financing instrument could support Ukraine’s early and long-term recovery and the country’s journey towards EU membership.

In recent quarters, the National Bank of Hungary (MNB) has measured substantial and growing overvaluation in the housing market, which has been coupled with an increase in banking sector risks related to lending. These risks have not decreased so far even with the uncertainty related to the war situation of the past months; hence, supporting banks' resilience with regulatory tools is warranted. The Financial Stability Board of the MNB has therefore decided to raise bank capital requirements and will increase the countercyclical capital buffer rate to 0.5% from 1 July 2023, for the first time since its introduction six years ago, Hungarian economic daily Portfolio.hu reports.

The Slovak construction market is the smallest among the member countries of the Euroconstruct area. Due to its size, it is significantly more affected by both favourable and unfavourable influences. Overall, the private sector contributes more to construction investment than the public sector. With one exception, civil engineering, where public investment is higher. In residential construction private investment exceeds public. This can be attributed to a widely neglected public rental housing programme in Slovakia, writes Radovan Kostelník from ÚEOS Komercia in his study for the independent organization Euroconstruct that unites research organisations from 19 EU countries.

After the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, real estate developers in Kyiv stopped working on construction sites and focused on defence processes. They handed over their equipment and materials for the construction of protective structures, created volunteer organizations, etc. By now, after the de-occupation of the settlements around the capital and the relative stabilization of the situation in Kyiv, some developers began to resume work on construction sites. Iryna Nastych summarised the situation in an article prepared by the Ukrainian Real Estate Club for Property Forum.

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.

The war launched by Russia on February 24th is still going on in Ukraine. Infrastructure facilities are being damaged every day. The cost of damages that experts share changes daily. According to the Centre for Economic Policy Research, the total expenses for reconstruction will range from $220 billion to $540 billion, writes Anna Nestulia, Principal at Invest in Projects for Property Forum.

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.

The European Central Bank has highlighted growing vulnerabilities in housing markets and stretched financial asset valuations in its Financial Stability Review for November 2021. The ECB has also warned of an increased likelihood of a correction in both residential and commercial real estate markets.

The performance of sectors relevant to the commercial real estate market improved in the second quarter of 2021, while the positive impact of growth on the real estate market fell short of that observed in previous cycles, partly due to the direct impact of the pandemic (lasting drop in tourism) and partly to uncertainties resulting from the trends accelerated by the pandemic (penetration of home office and e-commerce), the National Bank of Hungary (MNB) said in its latest Commercial Real Estate Market Report. In addition to an overview of the office, warehouse, hotel and retail markets, the report also reveals that the ratio of domestic investors in all property deals was nearly 80%, even higher than in the especially active year of 2019.