2016 reached the volume of €11.8bn in investment markets across Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, according to a research report by Colliers International. Aside from Poland, investment flows in 2017 will be close to or higher than 2016’s.  The retail sector might see continued rental growth and high investment levels across the region.

Deutsche Hospitality’s first hotel CEE hotel is set to open in by 2019. IntercityHotel Budapest will be located in a newly constructed building in forint of the City’s Eastern Railway Station (Keleti pályaudvar). It will have 300 rooms, a restaurant, a bar, a conference area and an underground car park with 200 spaces. 

The sound global and domestic investment climate generated a major push in property investment activity in Hungary reaching the second highest ever registered annual volume of €1.7 billion in 2016, i.e. 133% up from the previous year. The most popular type of assets were offices with a share of 56%, followed by retail at 25%, while industrial deals accounted for 11% of the overall volume.

Hilton has reached a franchise agreement with Accent Hotel Management to open Hilton Garden Inn Budapest City Centre. The 214-guestroom hotel is set to become Hilton’s third hotel in Budapest by 2018.

Search engines have become an integrated part of the daily life of people and companies as well. Not only the process of buying a book or planning a vacation has changed drastically over the last decade but companies looking for office space are also turning to the Internet more often. The latest Tea & Talk session, co-organised by RICS Hungary and VLK Cresa in Budapest, helped us understand how changes in technology will affect brokers, tenants and landlords.

The property management and (property and SPV) accounting of Váci Greens’ Building C, acquired by ZFP Investments, acting on behalf of the ZFP realitní fond, a Czech real estate fund entering the Hungarian commercial real estate market, is now performed by CBRE.

At the end of last year Colliers sold the former Bricostore DIY-unit in Törökbálint to Régió, a Hungarian toy company. The building has approx. 12,000 sqm of GLA and will be used by Régió for warehousing purposes.

Nearly 100,000 sqm of new office space was delivered to the Budapest market in 2016, the highest figure since 2010. Meanwhile, demand picked up in the last quarter of the year with a large share of the total leasing volume made up of pre-leases and new transactions. At the same time, the office vacancy rate has returned to its downward trajectory, reaching 9.5%, the lowest rate on record.

TriGranit announced the appointment of Tamás Páldi, M.D. as Human Resources Director and Mr. Mariusz Domeracki as Finance Director for Poland. 

In Q4 2016 total leasing activity amounted to 133,460 sqm on the Budapest industrial market which marks a 64% rise on a yearly basis. Meanwhile, the vacancy rate reached a new post-crisis low at 8.1% and there is currently no scheme offering more than 10,000 sqm available adjacent space. The Budapest Research Forum published its quarterly industrial market analysis.