MLP Group has released consolidated financial results for the first half of 2021, showing revenue of PLN 97.6m, up 16% year on year, and net profit of PLN 166.5m, up 38% year on year. Equity (net assets) rose 24% in the first six months of the year, to PLN 1.5bn, with gross investment property having advanced by 16%, to PLN 2.7bn.

Following the departure of Soren Rodian Olsen, who worked in Capital Markets at Cushman & Wakefield for nearly 10 years and has recently taken up a new position with a Scandinavian private equity group, a current client of Cushman & Wakefield, Jeff Alson, Head of CEE Capital Markets will be now focusing on operations in Poland as a new Head of Capital Markets Poland and will be supporting the local capital markets management team, comprising Pawel Partyka, Marcin Kocerba and Mira Kantor-Pikus. Their main area of expertise is logistics & retail, office as well as alternative sector and debt advisory respectively.

GARBE Industrial Real Estate Poland has acquired a new flagship production and warehouse facility of Hubergroup located in Wroclaw. The parties have signed a Preliminary Purchase Agreement for a new 22,000 sqm Build-to-Suit facility, on a 20-year term sale & leaseback transaction.

Poland’s largest cities only slightly adjust their planned investments due to the lower earnings caused by COVID-19. Similarly, zoning development plans are also not slowing down - as seen in talks between Urban Land Institute Poland (ULI Poland) and five cities involved in the project, “Around the city in 8 questions”. The series of discussions is expected to continue into the Fall, with another three meetings already planned.

Gabriel Biriş, Founding Partner at Biriş Goran talked to Property Forum about the pandemic’s impact on the legal advisory business and what concerns investors share with him regarding Romania’s tax and legal framework.

In H1 2021 Dino Polska, a grocery store network continued its geographic expansion. Its store count climbed by 150 in this period to 1,622. That means that save for Sundays a new Dino store was opened in Poland every single day. At the same time, Dino Polska created 2.4 thousand new jobs and at the end of June it had more than 28.2 thousand employees.

Not surpirngly, the easing of the COVID-19 pandemic has driven up interest in the acquisition of holiday homes. Marcin Dumania, CEO of Polish holiday apartment operator Sun & Snow talked to Property Forum about the holiday apartments industry’s struggles with the pandemic, forecasts for the upcoming months and the company’s investment plans.

Investment transactions totaling over €400 million are in different negotiations stages in Romania, mostly in the office and retail segments, according to real estate consultancy JLL Romania. 

During H1 2021, Czech residential developer Central Group has completed the acquisition of land plots in three Prague locations, Žižkov, Hloubětín and Vysočany, for CZK 750 million. It plans to build almost a thousand new apartments on the land.

The occupancy level in Prague’s hotels was just 10% during the first six months of this year, with revenue remaining far below the average of the pre-coronavirus years. Contrary to initial expectations, their owners are not selling them – definitely not on a mass scale. Investors’ interest in buying remains strong – more than one-third of them are “very” or “highly” interested in Prague, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s current Hotel Investor Beat survey. Investors obviously trust Prague’s hospitality market and perceive its current situation as temporary.