Adapt and urbanise

Rafał Ostrowski, ‘Eurobuild CEE’: You’ve been doing quite a lot of refurbishments and extensions recently, to mention just your Warsaw centres Atrium Promenada, Reduta and Targówek – where the work finished last year. What prompted you to embark on these redevelopments? Scott Dwyer, COO, Atrium European Real Estate: The real estate in our portfolio is about fifteen years old on average. So the assets needed some physical upgrading. What has changed over the last ten years is that retail concepts have become totally different when it comes to our top retailers and their size requirements. So we have to adapt to the retailers. If you don’t get ahead and move with them, they will leave your centres. Out of our top ten retailers ten years ago, 80 pct are not there any longer. So in the past our centres were about the hypermarket, the DIY and addressing consumers’ basic needs. That’s less relevant now, because people have more disposable income a