Savills has presented a preliminary summary of 2023 and predicted key trends going forward. The commercial property market in Poland is expected to see a rebound in investor, developer and tenant activity in the near future against the backdrop of continued global uncertainty and the climate crisis.

Savills has appointed Ondřej Míček as Head of the Industrial Agency for its Czech and Slovak operations from December 2023. Since joining Savills as a consultant concentrating primarily on industrial space leasing, Ondřej has expanded his role to cover industrial sales, land acquisitions and data centres. 

A number of branded residential schemes increased by over 160 percent in the last ten years. The residential sector became attractive even for prestigious "brands" from non-residential sectors such as Versace, Fendi, Armani or Tonino Lamborghini and they have also expanded their presence into this segment across major cities around the globe. Nevertheless, the concept of branded residences is not present in the Czech Republic yet, says a Savills report. 

According to Workthere.pl’s latest Flexmark report, larger companies (101+ people) and scale-ups (21-100 people) now account for 54% of global flexible office members, compared with 42% of members last year. The flexible office specialist notes that this increase is also reflected in take-up levels with these larger companies accounting for 34% of global take-up in flexible offices, compared to 22% in 2022 and just 13% in 2020.

New office supply reached nearly 236,000 sqm in Poland’s key regional cities in Q1-Q3 2023, says Savills. Gross take-up for the same period amounted to over 531,000 sqm, an increase of 19% year-on-year.

Octava Property Trust has sold a development plot for an SBU warehouse project to an Austrian investor. According to real estate advisory firm Savills, engaged in the search for investors in partnership with Avison Young, Warsaw is the fastest-growing warehouse market in Poland. 

Office availability in the Warsaw office market is shrinking, with the vacancy rate for the whole city down to 10.6% and to just over 9% in the centre, says Savills. Tenants are, however, likely to enjoy a wider choice of options once more office projects are restarted. This process is already slowly getting underway, as is clear from the growing development pipeline.

According to a survey conducted by Savills involving real estate investors with total Europe and Middle East assets under management (AuM) exceeding €500 billion, almost a third of investors are looking to adopt a more aggressive, value-added investment strategy over the next 12 months. This is up from 14% on last year’s survey, with only 28% expecting to deploy a more defensive strategy over the next 12 months, down from 55% last year.

CTP has leased approximately 110,000 sqm at the CTPark Warsaw West complex to Raben Group, one of the largest logistics companies in the world. This 10-year lease is the largest transaction in the warehouse and logistics market in Poland this year, for which the Raben Group was advised by Savills, and was also a record-breaking agreement for 2023 across CTP’s entire portfolio.

With a total value of $379.7 trillion at the end of 2022, real estate is worth more than the global equity and bond markets combined and is almost four times the size of global GDP, shows a Savills report.