Romania's Real Estate Yearbook 2020 has published "The New Normal - Market Pulse Report, Romania", an exclusive property market update on Romania at end of the lockdown.

Banks in Europe are expecting a slow recovery in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and while they forecast that hotel and retail loan portfolios will likely be hit more considerably than office and other real estate asset classes, the majority of them believes that the impairment will be in the range of a few percentage points up to 10% in total. These are some of the early findings from the COVID-specific section of this year's edition of KPMG's Property Lending Barometer, due to be published in autumn 2020.

What will the Warsaw office market look like in the next 18 months? Experts of Savills have outlined two potential scenarios. Both scenarios foresee a short-term decrease in demand and rising vacancy rates, but with a different scale of impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Polish capital’s office market. Both also forecast that the market will remain resilient in the long term.

Total demand on the Budapest office market in Q2 2020 reached 87,990 sqm, representing a 46% decrease year-on-year and the number of signed transactions dropped by almost 50% compared to the same quarter of 2019, according to BRF’s latest figures.

There are only four construction projects with a unit value in excess of PLN 3 billion (€670 million), excl. VAT, currently underway in Poland. The combined value of these projects, commonly referred to as megaprojects, is almost PLN 17 billion (€3.8 billion), excl. VAT. This is not a lot, given the fact that projects worth a total of nearly PLN 300 billion (€67 billion) are in the pipeline.

Results from the INREV Quarterly Index for the first quarter of 2020 reveal initial signs of the negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the European real estate industry, with the lowest quarterly performance since Q4 2012.

Fears that offices will no longer be needed in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak are overblown, and investors should keep an eye out for pricing opportunities, according to Savills Investment Management.

CEE’s highly skilled and lower cost workforce, its well-established track record and competitiveness in industrial production coupled with the fact that the region has enabled manufacturers to generate higher levels of economic output at disproportionately lower operating costs is a compelling case for continued FDI into the region, according to Colliers International.

According to Savills, the average spread between prime industrial and prime shopping centre yields across mainland Europe has converged for the first time in its historic series as demand for logistics and soars as a result of increased levels in e-commerce.

Pandemic-related economic and social restrictions have given rise to multiple questions on the office market. Will the demand for office space remain unabated? Will office projects underway be delivered on time? Cresa has reviewed pre-let levels and the progress of office projects currently under construction in Warsaw.