Most retailers want to attract customers in-store through omnichannel, while e-commerce is not meeting the expectations of food retailers, concluded speakers in the rediscovering retail panel of CEE Property Forum 2023, held in Vienna last month.

Investors' interest in the construction of retail parks in Serbia has not been declining for several years now. Investors are mostly focused on building new facilities in secondary and tertiary locations. As much as 14% of the total offer of retail parks in Serbia is located in the region of central Serbia. The Šumadija region is attracting more and more attention, so the company Peštan announced the opening of a new retail park in 2025 - Arandjelovac Retail Park. 

According to the State Employment Service, as of September 1, 2023, the number of vacancies in the construction industry exceeded the number of registered unemployed. Representatives of the largest developers in the capital speak of a shortage of workers. Olga Solovei summarised what is happening in the labour market in the construction sector of Ukraine in an article prepared by the Ukrainian Real Estate Club for Property Forum.

According to the preliminary results of the parliamentary elections held in Poland on Sunday, after 2 terms and 8 years of independent rule, Prawo i Spawiedliwość (Law and Justice) will have to hand over power to the opposition. This is certainly good news for foreign investors, who may have feared worsening chaos in law and taxation and, in the longer term, Poland's potential exit from the structures of the European Union.

The condition of the housing markets in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia remains good, but high interest rates have reduced the availability of mortgages, which has affected the demand for flats. Poland has broken out of this pattern, where, despite high financing costs, developers are breaking sales records. However, all these countries have one thing in common - the low activity of players in the PRS market, whose offer could be an effective response to the low creditworthiness of buyers. These are just some of the conclusions reached by the participants of the residential panel at CEE Property Forum 2023, which was organised in Vienna in September.

Romania Green Building Council (RoGBC), together with the Association for Promoting Energy Efficiency in Buildings (ROENEF), have announced the launch of the Green Gala Awards 2023, the event that rewards excellence in the field of sustainability of the built environment. The competition aims to award projects implemented as a result of innovative actions and initiatives that add value to both the community and the environment.

SEE is still a land of opportunities but things go too slowly. The size of a single country is too small for international institutional investors who prefer to buy large portfolios rather than individual assets. However, sizeable local players were optimistic about the change in foreign investors’ attitudes at the panel devoted to the investment market in this region at CEE Property Forum 2023 in Vienna.

“In times of change, Expo Real once again confirms how important personal exchange is for the real estate industry”, says Markus Arnold, CEO and sole owner of Arnold Investments. This is also the reason why the company is on site with an international team from ten countries and an unchanged large exhibition stand.

Savills has prepared an overview of how the real estate market should react to the changing age structure of the global population. This study carried out as part of Savills Impacts programme, is about the prediction of residential supply and related services and hybrid working models. The fact that many Western countries are some of the fastest ‘ageing’ in the world isn’t news. In 10 years' time, the largest proportion of the Czech Republic’s population will be between 50 and 59 years old. Other countries in CEE are in a similar position. In Germany, Austria, Italy or France, the dominant age group will be 60 to 69. Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, many African nations are seeing increases in their youthful populations. 

Global real estate - one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions - should become net-zero in less than three decades. With as much as 80% of the predicted building stock for 2050 already in existence today, this best illustrates the scale of the challenge. Meanwhile, the commercial real estate market has not, as yet, officially acknowledged either the costs of necessary property upgrades or the costs of delaying or not taking any action. At the same time, due to a lack of market standards, benchmarks and a system of data collection, valuers can hardly factor ESG risks in property valuations. This impasse has significantly increased the risk of a carbon bubble, says Cushman & Wakefield.