Geopolitical tensions hurt demand for commercial property, appetite for property development, financing conditions and property investment decisions over the short run, the Hungarian National Bank (MNB) reports.

Companies in the IT&C sector had a share of 32% in Bucharest’s office lease market in Q1 and generated 93.6% of new leasing transactions in regional cities such as Cluj-Napoca, Iași, Timișoara and Sibiu.

Passerinvest Group a.s. has entered into an off-market agreement with the investor Simona Otavova for the purchase of the building housing the general headquarters of the state-funded organization Road and Motorway Directorate of the Czech Republic (Ředitelství silnic a dálnic ČR – ŘSD). The value of the transaction was not disclosed. The change of ownership was announced today by Passerinvest.

The Prague office building Parkview currently owned by Deka Immobilien is now 100% leased. The nine-story building developed and finished in 2020 by Skanska in the Pankrác district will house the software company JetSoft and the research technology company Lucid, Skanska, the original developer of the building, announced today.

Yareal announced that it has signed a contract with a general contractor responsible for completing the final stages of its flagship office complex, LIXA. FineTech Construction will build two office buildings with a total area of 29,000 sqm near Daszyński Roundabout. So far, nearly 49,000 sqm of modern offices have already been developed here at LIXA, including the most recently commissioned building C, which will soon be ready to welcome its first tenants. 

Romanian developer Genesis Property will invest €50 million in the transformation of office complex Novo Park into YUNITY Park, a campus that will include co-working and co-living spaces. The project spanning seven buildings with a leasable area of 75,000 sqm will be completed in the first quarter of 2023. 

Prime rent in the first quarter of 2022 increased again and is in the range of €24.00-24.50 per sqm per month in the city centre. In addition to rents, rising construction prices are still reflected in offers of allowances for office build-outs or other incentives. The Prague Research Forum published the office market figures for Q1 2022.

MNK Partners has appointed real estate advisory firm Savills as property manager for its newly acquired office building NC3.

Hungarian developer Futureal has signed a loan agreement worth €79.5 million with UniCredit Bank to finance the construction and long-term operation of the Corvin Innovation Campus office complex in Budapest. 

As the pandemic forced many of us to shift a work-from-home routine, some people predicted that “the office is a dead concept” and that it will never return. I would agree that the office as we knew it is actually really dead, but the “new office” is here and all of us need to adapt to it, writes Petr Florián, Associate Director, Office Leasing at Avison Young in the Czech Republic for Property Forum in an opinion piece.