Opportunity knocked
Editorial
It started, as it so often does, quite innocently. From an article I read. The author was discussing the merits of buying an apartment or a house in Sicily. As he explained, the Italian residential market is suffering – just like the entire, crisis-stricken, Italian economy. So it must also represent an opportunity worth seizing – or even one that should be grabbed with both hands. I was reading this in the spring of last year, but since then the idea has germinated in my mind. Admittedly, at the beginning of 2014 the Economic and Sociological Research Centre for the Real Estate Market reported that the Italian residential market had already bottomed out and that this year would see a recovery, but my mind had been made up: we were flying to Sicily. I’m not actually planning to buy a villa surrounded by olive groves and grapevines; instead I intend to relax and soak up these surroundings. However, somewhere in my subconscious there is the small hope that we will find ourselves presented with the perfect opportunity...
There’s little point, however, looking for such bargains in Warsaw or Prague. Polish developers are enjoying record apartment sales, prices are slowly climbing, and some of the companies operating in Poland, e.g. Robyg, Echo Investment and Okam Capital, as well as Central Group in Prague, are building up large land banks. In our article entitled ‘The Plot Thickens’, we ask: what sort of money are they planning to invest in plots, why are they doing their land shopping now, and what lies in store for the residential market in this part of Europe? In the meantime, I’ll be trying to find out more about the trends and prices of apartments on the Sicilian real estate market.
