Student.com, the world’s leading marketplace for international student housing, and Bonard, the global market research experts for student housing, see 2020 as a year of change, as international students have broken with traditional ways of booking student accommodation. Changes in demand, room type and lead time have all taken place as the world and the global higher education sector figure out the ‘new normal’.

The Little Genius private school rented a historical monument villa located on Kiseleff Boulevard in Bucharest in order to meet the social distancing requirements imposed by the authorities, the transaction being intermediated by Cushman & Wakefield Echinox.

Local developer One Untied Properties announced that its One Verdi Park project, located in the Floreasca neighbourhood of northern Bucharest, will focus mainly on exclusive residential units. The developer’s initial plan included a 17-floor office tower, offering 21,000 sqm of commercial space, alongside a residential tower. One Verdi Park is scheduled for completion in Q4 2021.

Approximately 1.22 million new residencies were built in Romania between 1990 and 2019, representing only 13.4% of the total dwellings stock calculated by the National Institute of Statistics, so the residential stock is mainly composed of apartments built under the communist regime, having a low degree of comfort in most cases, according to an analysis realised by Cushman & Wakefield Echinox real estate consulting company.

Unusually, due to the current situation, Euroconstruct has issued an interim forecast which is a revision of the June construction market forecast. The results have been summarised by János Gáspár, head of Euroconstruct's Hungarian research institute, Buildecon.

The construction sector in Bulgaria, and building construction in particular, was not affected as hard as others by the COVID-19 crisis, according to a report by the Eastern European Construction Forecasting Association.

Cordia International Zrt. has acquired UK developer Blackswan. Cordia financed the transaction by using funds collected from the bond issuance under National Bank of Hungary’s Bond Funding for Growth Scheme. The acquisition allows Blackswan to deliver a £550 million project pipeline across the West Midlands

Arad-based developer Wallberg has secured a €7.3 million loan from Garanti Bank for the construction of the second tower of the XCity Towers complex, the first residential tower in the city of Timișoara, a project worth €75 million which will total 955 apartments.

The first building of the Resi4Rent project, being part of the Warsaw Brewery, has obtained its occupancy permit. In the all-purpose part of Warsaw's Wola district, revitalized by Echo Investment, Resi4Rent has developed 450 apartments for long-term rent. The first tenants have been moving in.

Cordia International, the residential development platform of Futureal Group has successfully managed its second bond issuance on the Budapest Stock Exchange to finance its further expansion, predominantly in CEE. The developer raised HUF 36 billion (€105 million) in its latest transaction which was heavily oversubscribed by financial institutions and achieved a 2.46% yield. Last November Cordia successfully placed a HUF 44 billion (€305 million) 7-year bond at 3.82% yield.