The road to recovery

Judging by the christmas cards and the new year’s wishes ‘Eurobuild CEE’ received in december, there is a lot of hope on the market. After a remarkable – unfortunately mainly in a negative way – 2009, market players are hungry for some good news. Is there any? We posed this question to the people who are closest to the market – the top managers of the leading real estate consultancies. The first of these was Bert Hesselink, head of the office and industrial agency at dtz in the Czech Republic. and his reply? Yes, there are some green shoots, but just to be on the safe side, don’t get too carried away. Yet Mladen Petrov Take-up was 30-50 pct lower, accompanied by decreasing supply and falling rents – this is, in a  nutshell, how 2009 looked for the CEE office market. The market has demonstrated that ‘prime’ price sensitivity is much lower in hard times than it is for ‘sub-prime’ properties, which do not meet all