New housing has become more expensive in most European countries over the last years, including 2019. Among 23 countries participating in Deloitte Property Index Study, 20 showed growth in prices of new dwellings and only three of them saw a price decrease. Experts in the residential real estate market expected the growth trend to continue in 2020, but they became less optimistic in the context of COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, in almost half of participating countries, the residential market is expected to stagnate this year in terms of price and experts in only six countries have positive expectations.

The drop in footfall numbers in the majority of shopping centres combined with a drop in turnover, as well as ongoing talks between tenants and shopping centre owners have caused a slowdown or even temporary suspension of development plans of some retail chains, especially those in the fashion sector. JLL summarised conditions on Poland's retail market at the end of H1 2020.

Globalworth published a trading update summarising the key highlights of its operating performance during the first six months of the year, including some further updates as to the impact of the pandemic crisis on its operations.

According to Savills, commercial property investment activity hit €2.92 billion across Poland in H1 2020, up by almost 5% on the same period in 2019. Despite COVID-19 challenges, it was the second-best result in the first half of a year on record. Savills anticipates that the pandemic’s impact will be noticeable in H2 2020, but the investment volume is unlikely to fall by more than 20% compared to last year’s all-time high.

Total demand on the Budapest industrial market amounted to 202,610 sqm in Q2 2020, which is two times higher than the figure registered in the same period last year and 17% higher than the 4-year average Q2 volume. The Budapest Research Forum published its quarterly industrial market analysis

The first half of 2020 saw a record high investment activity with €3.5 billion of investment transactions closed on the Polish market. Although this was a 30% higher result compared to the corresponding period of last year, achieving a full-year result similar to the record-breaking €7.8 billion volume of 2019 may be difficult, according to Avison Young.

The top 50 largest technology companies in Romania, which realise software and digital solutions for group companies or for third parties, have increased their turnover and teams in Romania by approximately four times in the last ten years, reaching a cumulative turnover of €3 billion and over 50,000 employees in 2019, according to a Cushman & Wakefield Echinox analysis.

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.