PL

Edition 4 (267) April 2022

Editorial

Fuelled by hope

As you may remember, we closed our March issue on February 22nd. Threatening rumbles could already be heard from beyond Poland’s border with Ukraine, but the world was still clinging on to the hope that the prospect of war would fizzle out without any further escalation of the situation

Tomasz Cudowski, editor-in-chief
Small talk

Help knows no borders

Polish hotel group Arche has been going out of its way to provide accommodation for Ukrainian refugees. Władysław Grochowski, the chairman of Arche Group, tells us exactly how it is able to do this while maintaining its normal operations.

Small talk

Rent rises take to the driving seat

Karol Skiba, the investment director of stock brokerage CVI, gives us his perspective on the health of the investment market for logistics assets post-pandemic – and how the war in Ukraine might have both negative and positive consequences for it.

Small talk

Non-stop Action

The name Action seems to reflects how the Dutch retail chain operates. In 2017, it opened its first Polish store in Leszno and just two years later had opened 30. Now it has a network of more than 170. The opening of a logistics centre in Bieruń – the first outside the Netherlands to be wholly managed by Action – is also a sign of the speed of your expansion. Do you intend to maintain this tempo?

Stock market report

War takes centre stage

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has panicked global stock exchanges. Over just one month we saw the imposition of financial sanctions on an unprecedented scale, while trading in Moscow was suspended, large oscillations on the commodity market occurred and emerging markets have seen their currencies weaken (the euro is now around PLN 5). But the overall balance isn’t all as bad as could have been expected, at least for the indices in Poland

Investment & Finance

The Ukrainian uncertainty principle

Real estate valuers insist that the conflict in Ukraine is having little effect on the valuations of commercial properties in Poland, but they are still waiting for the next few transactions before making their final judgement

Rafał Ostrowski
Feature

Time for the big boys

All the different property classes have matured. The markets will no longer accept weak or mediocre projects. The time is past for easy universal solutions – and this also means the end of one-man agencies – Grzegorz Mroczek, the vice-president of CREAM Property Advisors, tells ‘Eurobuild’ in this exclusive interview

Office & mixed-use development

Provincial promise

After a tumultuous two years blighted by Covid, the regional office market in Poland might seem to have fallen off the radar. So, we took a trip around the country to see what the five biggest cities outside Warsaw still have to offer

Alex Hayes
Green projects

Sustainability at your desk

Fitting out offices isn’t just about adding chill-out zones, social rooms and flexible workspaces – it’s also one of the ways a company can reduce its carbon footprint to achieve its ESG goals

Magdalena Rachwald
Architecture

People in (and outside) glass houses

Koneser in Praga, the Norblin factory in Wola and Elektrownia in Powiśle – more and more of Warsaw’s districts have places with historic grounds, where both local residents and tourists can go to relax, eat or take part in events. Soon Wola is to gain another such venue

Anna Korólczyk-Lewandowska
Human resources

The expat eye

As international investment eventually started to trickle and eventually flood in after the political transformation of Poland in the 1990s, so did the expatriates or “expats” – the foreign professionals bringing Western know-how and contacts to the nascent Polish property scene

Nathan North
Events

A few clouds over the beach

Around 20,000 delegates from over 80 countries turned up at the MIPIM real estate fair in mid-March after a three-year break. The face-to-face networking and in-person events were supposed to represent the end of the pandemic and the return to normal business relations, but the shadow of the war in Ukraine hung over the fair

Endpiece

Light in the darkness

Each of the last few years seems to have brought with it some new calamity that was even worse than the last. And then, just when it seemed that there might be a flicker of light at the end of this long, depressing tunnel, along came the invasion of Ukraine

Nathan North

Editions

Categories