Due to the prolonged COVID-19 epidemic, some tenants on the Warsaw office market are postponing relocations, looking for sublessees or downsizing their offices. According to the Cresa Polska report "Occupier Economics: Office market in Warsaw in the third quarter of 2020", office take-up amounted to 113,000 sqm in Q3 2020, which is the weakest quarterly result in the last 10 years. Warsaw’s office stock reached 5.8 million sqm.

Demand in Q1-Q3 2020 was 35% lower on Warsaw’s office market than in the corresponding period last year, while another trend is a growing volume of office space available for sublease.  JLL summarised the Warsaw office market at the end of Q3 2020.

Panattoni is to expand its warehousing assets near Warsaw. Already the developer has 176,000 sqm of industrial space at its disposal in the village of Janki and it has just announced the creation of more. The company has purchased a further 3.14 ha next to the S8 for further development.

The share of internet sales has returned to near pre-pandemic levels. At the same time, Polish customers are more willing than before to turn to convenience shopping in smaller retail formats. JLL summarised conditions on Poland's retail market at the end of Q3 2020.

Panattoni has started construction work on a factory for Danfoss Poland in Grodzisk Mazowiecki. The development with an area of 12,000 sqm will be equipped with several ecologically friendly systems that will make the building highly energy-efficient and also improve the conditions for the workforce of around 400 people. The building is scheduled to be completed in November 2021. It will be used as a place to manufacture components for the RAC (Refrigeration & Air Conditioning) business division.

Data centres are becoming an important segment of commercial real estate and the COVID-19 pandemic turned out to be an impulse for its accelerated growth. There are currently 115 data centres in Poland, of which the highest number is located in Warsaw (35), Katowice and Kraków (13 each). Axi Immo anticipates the market to develop further, especially following the decision by IT giants Google and Microsoft to add Warsaw to their list of global cloud regions, with a pledged investment of $2 billion and $1 billion respectively over the coming years. Axi Immo experts have prepared a report on the Polish data centre market, its requirements and specific features.

7R has won a tender to purchase 20 ha of land in the Pomeranian Logistics Centre. On the plot, the developer will build the 7R Park Gdańsk Port complex, with a total area of approx. 123,000 sqm. The land property is located in the immediate vicinity of the Port of Gdańsk, and the largest deepwater terminal in the Baltic Sea – DCT Gdańsk.

JLL has appointed Mateusz Bonca as CEO of Poland, effective mid-November. He will be based in Warsaw.

As of the end of Q3 2020, €3.9 billion have been transacted on Poland’s property market since the beginning of the year. The result is slightly lower than in the years 2018 and 2019, however, it is worth noting that despite the investors’ “wait and see” strategy at the beginning of COVID-19 pandemic, the outcome is still impressive. As many investors are returning to transactions which were put aside, multiple deals should be closed within the last quarter of the year which has always been a period of intense activity on the market, according to a report by Avison Young.

The investment volume on the Polish commercial property market is estimated to have reached €1.05 billion in Q3 2020. According to Savills, the industrial sector accounted for approximately 70% of that total, which illustrates the current investor preference for logistics properties, especially facilities dedicated to e-commerce.