The gold is ours

I know that this is not the best time or place to sing the praises of the fourteen heroes in white and red, but our work on the October issue coincided with the Men’s Volleyball World Championship. On Sunday September 21st, millions of Poles, oblivious to everything else in the world, were glued to their TVs with their fingers crossed for our team. And we succeeded! After 40 years we were finally back on top of the world once again, having defeated the mighty Canarinhos of Brazil in the final. The bronze went to Germany following their third place play-off match against France. The Poles lost just one match – against the USA. And that was the very match we went to see, together with a group of real estate professionals and representatives of the city of Łódź in the town’s Atlas Arena. A few hours earlier we had all been discussing the state of play on the Łódź real estate market – or rather, how it was a game that had not really got going. The trick is to sell a finished product, not just to build it. Are investors bold enough to enter regional markets, such as the other host towns of the volleyball championships: Katowice (the final), Bydgoszcz, Wrocław, Kraków and Gdańsk/Sopot? Warsaw, where the Poles defeated the Serbs in the opening match on August 30th, probably does not have many rivals for the gold among the other capitals of Central and Eastern Europe. Poland, with its capital city way ahead of the rest of the field, easily attracts the most capital. The experts we asked in the ‘Investment Dilemmas’ article in this issue have forecast around EUR 3.5 bln for 2014. Can we beat our result from last year? It’s just possible that the regular visitors to the Munich Expo Real investment fair will know the answer to that question. So we shall just have to go there and ask them.