CEE NEPI Rockcastle boosts the pipeline

Resilient economic growth and rising household consumption in CEE is outpacing Western European countries, driving consumers through NEPI Rockcastle’s shopping centre doors, and attracting growing numbers of international retailers, as well as local companies, seeking space within its largest portfolios in Romania and Poland and seven other regional markets.

NEPI Rockcastle is carefully calibrating its development pipeline and financing to match the strong demand for space we’re seeing from international and local retailers in CEE, as well as from other sectors such as entertainment and hospitality. The region is under-supplied for retail space in comparison with Western Europe, but economies in CEE countries are growing at twice the rate... When these factors are combined with the central economic and social role our dominant shopping centres play in their markets, which is much more significant than in the rest of the EU, the megatrends and corporate strategy driving NEPI’s record financial results last year and our ambitious development and refurbishment programme, alongside the large acquisitions we made at the end of 2022, become very clear. We expect the current development pipeline to become accretive to earnings from 2027.
Rüdiger Dany, NEPI Rockcastle CEO

NEPI Rockcastle has 168,800 sqm of development and refurbishment projects, underway or planned this year, in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania, foremost of which are:

• Promenada Mall Extension, Bucharest – a EUR 282 mln, 55,400 sqm mixed-use extension being built alongside the Promenada Mall in Bucharest’s central business district, due to be completed by the end of 2026.

• Promenada Plovdiv, Bulgaria – a planned EUR 173 mln, 60,500 sqm greenfield development in Bulgaria’s second largest city. Completion of the project is expected in 2026.

• Bonarka City Center Mall, Kraków, Poland – a EUR 79 mln refurbishment where an ingenious internal architectural redesign has added 4,700 sqm to the 74,700 sqm centre.

• Galati, Romania – plans are being progressed for a new EUR 48 mln, 33,200 sqm retail park on the outskirts of this port town on the Danube River in northeast Romania.

• Arena Mall, Budapest – a comprehensive EUR 31 mln, five-year refurbishment programme.

Other NEPI Rockcastle projects underway – total investments of EUR 39 mln – are being made in a 7,400 sqm extension at Ploiesti Shopping City in Romania, adding 2,800 sqm at Galeria Wołomin, near Warsaw, and 4,800 sqm at the Pogoria Shopping Centre, Dąbrowa Górnicza, both in Poland.

NEPI Rockcastle also plans to extend its highly successful pilot solar energy production project, where photovoltaic panels installed on its Romanian assets in 2023 are now producing around 25 pct of the total energy needs of its shopping centres in the country, to the rest of its portfolio across CEE markets. The returns on investment in the production and sale of renewable energy to tenants has proved to be on average around double the returns of investing in the underlying retail real estate in Romania.