Romanian real estate developer Impact Developer & Contractor, listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange, enters the real estate market in Iași through the acquisition of a 19,068 sqm land plot. The transaction marks a major step in the developer’s strategy for implementing residential projects in large cities throughout the country.

Student Depot, owned by Kajima Student Housing Limited in partnership with Griffin Real Estate Partners, announced the opening of its first facility in the university city of Gdańsk, Student Depot Kolobrzeska.

The Râul Doamnei - Eroilor section of the M5 metro line, inaugurated in September, will shorten the travelling time for 150,000 Bucharest inhabitants who live near the 10 newly built stations, also offering a quick travel alternative for almost 20,000 employees working in companies whose office buildings’ headquarters are located in the Eroilor - Progresului – Politechnica areas. The Râul Doamnei, Constantin Brâncuși, Valea Ialomiței and Romancierilor metro stations, located at the western end of the new metro line, each have a catchment area of between 18,000 and 22,000 people who can access the metro within a 10-minute walk, according to data from Cushman & Wakefield Echinox.

Local real estate developer Forty Management has acquired a 39,896 sqm plot of land of in the Străulești area of ​​the Bucharest from Butan Gas Romania in a transaction valued at €8.2 million. The developer plans to deliver the Central District Lagoon City mixed-use project with 570 apartments, hotel, offices and commercial space, following an investment of over €100 million.

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.