PL

Edition 7 (202) July 2015

Editorial

Off at a tangent

Phew! What a scorcher! Since the school year ended, Poland has been hit by a heat wave.

Ewa Andrzejewska
Office & mixed-use development

Polish service centre boom

POLAND Service centres with foreign capital are currently employing 150,000 specialists in 532 centres across the country, according to the latest ABSL report, ‘The Modern Business Services Sector in Poland in 2015’. This means that since April 2014, such companies have created 22,000 jobs across the country. Around 60 new Polish centres have been opened since the beginning of 2014. The report was released at the 6th ABSL Conference in Kraków, which ‘Eurobuild Central & Eastern Europe’ was a media partner of. It was drawn up in cooperation with Antal International, Baker & McKenzie, Everest Group and JLL.

Investment & finance

Echo takeover completed – and more besides

CEE REGION In June Michał Sołowow sealed the disposal of his 41.55 pct stake in Kielce-based developer Echo Investment for PLN 1.114 bln (PLN 6.5 per share), after the European Commission gave the share acquisition its consent under its simplified merger control procedures. The new owner of the largest single stake in the company is Echo BV, a company managed by Griffin Real Estate and co-controlled by Pimco and Oaktree. The transaction was financed by Poland’s largest insurer PZU. However, Michał Sołowow has not sold all his shares in the development group. He still holds 17.9 mln shares in Echo via his subsidiary Synthos Dwory 7, constituting 4.33 pct of the company’s share capital.

Tomasz Szpyt
Residential

I2 Development plans big

POLAND Fourteen buildings on a 2.6 ha plot between the Old Town and the river in Wrocław – these are the plans for a new, lively quarter of the city around 8 Jana Pawła II square. The development plans for the former Babiński hospital have already been submitted to the monuments preservation officer.

Anna Pakulniewicz
Warehouse & industrial

North-West passage

We meet on the occasion of the opening the second stage of the North-West Logistic Park project in Szczecin. This phase involved the delivery of a 14,000 sqm hall and the larger ‘C’ hall with an area of 28,000 sqm. The total area of the warehouse and production complex amounts to 64,000 sqm and the entire space has already been developed.

Ewa Andrzejewska
Hotels

Mercure holds back the years

POLAND Even though the Mercure hotel brand is now more than forty years old, its owners are making sure that it is not showing its age. The renovation of two hotels under the brand in the TriCity – Mercure Gdynia Centrum (former Orbis Gdynia) and Mercure Gdańsk Posejdon (the former Orbis Posejdon Gdańsk) – has recently been completed. The aim is for the hotels to emulate the quality of the chain’s model hotel in the area – Mercure Gdańsk Old Town.

Aneta Cichla
Stock market report

Beware of Greeks wanting gifts

The Grexit. The term became the main buzzword of the markets in June – but unfortunately a negative one. The situation in Greece impacted the global financial markets all month, pushing down the indexes – and mostly the European ones. Meanwhile, on the WSE there was an ‘exchange’ – Gant disappeared and Atal emerged

Feature

Money on the streets

Polish and foreign investment funds are increasingly going for the money lying on the... high street. They are interested in small convenience centres or very small outlets on high streets. Their appetite is growing. But there are not enough morsels around to satisfy them

Aneta Cichla
Investment & finance

Rightfully theirs

Reprivatisation, one of the areas of the post-communist transformation of Poland that has generated much emotion in past, is still putting certain groups of society at loggerheads, such as former owners and those who acquired the rights to use properties after the war. how hard is it to recover properties, whether these are the palaces of large families or tenement buildings in Warsaw? Michał Sobański, the heir to the aristocratic Sobański family, outlines the situation from the legal point of view

Anna Pakulniewicz
Hotels

Choice of hotel

The hospitality sector is becoming an increasingly attractive proposition for investors and developers. The former are hoping that due to the limited number of interesting opportunities in other segments they will manage to find a pearl in the form of a hotel, while the latter are convinced that with the oversupply of offices and retail, hotels could turn out to be the best way to move forward. But is the game worth the candle?

Tomasz Szpyt
Office & mixed-use development

Common or garden?

A well designed area around a development could turn into its most attractive feature. Developers have been cottoning on to this, with the growth – literally – of more and more of these creative projects

Rafał Ostrowski
Architecture

Planes, trains and much else besides

At the end of May, Terminal 1 of the Fryderyk Chopin Airport in Warsaw was reopened after extension work and an extensive refurbishment according to a design by Lamela Polska, the Polish branch of Spanish architectural group Estudio Lamela. The studio was also recently responsible for the design of two stations of the new Warsaw metro line and two football stadiums, among other projects. We spoke to Carlos Lamela, the president of the board of Estudio Lamela, about his studio’s growing presence in this country

Nathan North
Events

Inventive and eventful investment event

Our real estate investment conference this year, held at the Warsaw Hilton on June 12th, not only covered the most crucial challenges facing market players in these uncertain times, but also featured a number of innovations

Nathan North
Events

The sultans of swing (and ping)

Tennis balls pinging and golf clubs swinging and... flamboyant Brazilian rhythms – this is how real estate professionals spent June 19th, the day of Eurobuild CEE’s twin summer showpieces: the 14th Golf Tournament and the 10th Tennis Tournament

Endpiece

High heels on a building site?

“This woman cannot go in,” she heard, while visiting one of the skyscraper building sites in the centre of Warsaw. “What do you mean? I got in THERE,” she replied offended, referring to her visit to the site of a rival project

Anna Pakulniewicz

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