Panattoni wants more
Warehouse & industrialBack in mid-2005, Carl Panattoni, the founder of the company, hired Robert Dobrzycki to develop the business in the country. “Our entry onto the market encouraged investors. Earlier on warehouse developers kept products for themselves. We were the first one to prove that warehouse is also an excellent investment product. And these days it is one of the core investment products,” says Robert Dobrzycki, the managing partner for Europe at Panattoni Europe. According to him, 2015 and 2005 have a lot in common in terms of the economic conditions. “Over the last ten years of our operations there were only three years of a dynamic market development (2005-2008). The remaining years are either crisis or post-crisis times. This market situation paradoxically gave us a boost. It is difficult to shift a balance of power on the aready settled market when the market situation is stable and good. Opportunities emerge when hard times begin,” stresses Robert Dobrzycki.
In the interview he gave ‘Eurobuild Poland’ in September 2005 he said that he would start from small niche projects. However, he did not keep his word entirely. The first Panattoni contracts in Poland comprised a 12,000 sqm Coty deal in Panattoni Park Bielsko-Biała and a 52,000 sqm H&M in Panattoni Park Poznań I. The company believes that a lot of factors facilitated its success, including the development of road infrastructure in Poland.
Nowadays, apart from five major markets where the company already operates (Warsaw, Łódź, Poznań, Wrocław and Silesia), the warehousing developer is exploring such local markets as Bydgoszcz, Lublin and Szczecin. The company is now starting the construction work on a 28,000 sqm property in Rzeszów, where it acquired a Polish Post plot located near the local airport. “In 2008 we established a team responsible for BTS projects. It was also an important step in the history of our company,” believes Robert Dobrzycki. He claims that Panattoni was the company that started a trend for building tailor-made facilities, particularly in special economic zones, in Poland. The developer worked for such companies such as Bosch, Manuli, Pilkington and Faurecia. The largest Panattoni Polish projects so far included H&M in Panattoni Park Poznań I (52,000 sqm in 2006), Leroy Merlin in Panattoni Park Stryków (56,000 sqm in 2008), Tesco (57,000 sqm in 2010), Castorama in Stryków (50,000 sqm in 2013) and two Amazon contracts in 2014.
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