Bratislava's Aupark shopping centre, owned by Wood & Company and Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, is adding another step to improve its sustainable management. In addition to sorting, low-energy lighting and water conservation, it is now installing hundreds of photovoltaic panels on its roof. The owners are hoping to make significant savings in energy resources, most notably saving 100,000 cubic metres of natural gas per year, reports the online daily Reality.trend.sk.

The Slovak construction market is the smallest among the member countries of the Euroconstruct area. Due to its size, it is significantly more affected by both favourable and unfavourable influences. Overall, the private sector contributes more to construction investment than the public sector. With one exception, civil engineering, where public investment is higher. In residential construction private investment exceeds public. This can be attributed to a widely neglected public rental housing programme in Slovakia, writes Radovan Kostelník from ÚEOS Komercia in his study for the independent organization Euroconstruct that unites research organisations from 19 EU countries.

Slovak developer Corwin has announced that its office projects in Bratislava and Ljubljana will soon join the list of LEED Zero Carbon certified carbon neutral buildings of which there are only 8 in existence at the moment.

Actual sales prices of real estate in the Slovak Republic reached high growth at the beginning of the year, mainly due to rising sales prices of new houses and flats, the Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic announced.

A new logistics park will be built in Ziar nad Hronom in central Slovakia by autumn 2023. The developer Contera will construct it here for € 22 million. The first big tenant is already assured too, it will be the electronics wholesaler Fast Plus, writes logistikadnes.sk. 

Since the 1970s, the centre of Bratislava's Old Town has been divided by the multi-stream road Staroměstská Street. The City Hall, together with the Bratislava Metropolitan Institute, now has a plan to improve the area. They want to build a park and a large pedestrian plaza above the road to bring the divided city together and add a new residential and recreational space to the city, the Slovak capital's city hall has announced.

Newly approved building regulations in Slovakia will significantly reduce the endless waiting for building permits. Thanks to advanced digitalisation, the individual processes and the timeframes for their execution are shortened. Builders will thus be able to calculate the capital invested and the entire work schedule more accurately. Therefore, a new Office for Spatial Planning and Construction is being established as a central state administration body, as well as a specialised construction office for the so-called EIA of construction at the Ministry of the Environment, webnoviny.sk informs.

The fifth stage of the Bory Housing residential project is being prepared in the newly emerging Bory district in the northwest of Bratislava. This week the documentation for the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) was submitted. At the same time, documents for obtaining a zoning decision are being prepared. The fifth stage will bring 366 apartments to the site with construction expected to start in the first half of 2024, the developer announced this week.

The beginning of the year was marked by the Russian invasion of Ukraine which caused various obstacles to the Slovak economy. It pushes inflation up to the highest in 17 years as also the prices of food, housing and energy. Nevertheless, the lifted lockdown measures helped boost retail sales and new office leases surpassed renegotiations for the sixth quarter in a row. Experts also saw a record quarter with substantial take-up and plunging vacancy rates, Cushman & Wakefield Slovakia presents in their new report on the Slovak economy.

YIT Slovakia has announced an international urban planning and architectural competition for the transformation of the area along Viedenská cesta (Vienna Road) in Bratislava into quality housing. The sensitive transformation of the site in the distant neighbourhood of the former "Pečnianský rameno" is to be carried out with an emphasis on ecological forms of housing and with respect for the existing environment. 6 renowned studios from 4 countries were invited to participate in the competition, YIT Slovakia informed.