|
The crisis is easing off, so home builders return to their frozen investment plans. New buildings find their buyers quicker and quicker.
Today in our city there is ca. half a million of square meters of top standard office space, which are available for rent. Yet one can see, more and more, the weakening of the effects of the crisis that has suspended the implementation of many important projects in Kraków.
Bonarka Offices, a Kraków-based company, has recently signed a contract to launch the construction of the first stage of Bonarka 4 Business complex. The project, suspended at the end of 2009 because of the crisis, will be financed by the PKO BP bank. Owing to that cooperation, two office buildings of the total surface area of almost 17,000 sq.m. will be ready in a year from now. Each of them will have 7 storeys, including 6 storeys for offices and the ground floor for service outlets. "Presently, 60% of office space in our buildings have already been rented, therefore we are glad with the financing offered by the bank. We are going to start construction works in May, so that to be able to meet uneventfully the April 2011 completion deadline of the first two buildings," announces President Tomasz Lisiecki of TriGranit Development Polska. The value of that stage of the project is estimated at 114 million Polish Zlotys.
Another project scheduled to be launched still in this year is Green Office - a complex of three energy-efficient office buildings to be constructed by the Buma Group.
Property market experts estimate however that despite intensified business activities, projects to be completed in 2010 include mainly those, which were started in the times of the economic boom. One of them is the Awatar office building in Armii Krajowej Avenue, recently completed and put into use. Representatives of the Buma Group announced that the first of four tower blocks of Quattro Business Park would be put into use in July. The available office space in the facility, estimated in total at ca. 12,000 sq.m., was rented almost immediately. The main tenant in Quattro Business Park will be the French outsourcing company Capgemini, which is going to move its offices in there from another building in the city.
"Capgemini has rented nearly 10,000 sq.m. They will move in September. By that time, we will be adjusting the premises to the tenant's requirements. We will still have available service outlets on the ground floor and part of the last floor, half of which has already been rented," explains Mr. Piotr Michalski from the Buma Group. He also declares that the construction of the second tower in Quattro will begin at the end of April and in the beginning of May.
"Banks require from construction companies to have 40 percent of their own financial contribution. Before the crisis, they asked for half less, so you can easily calculate that to complete a single project, a company has to provide twice as much of its own funds. So instead of two projects, we can have only one, and the situation, for the time being, keeps unchanged," indicates Mr. Szymon Duda from the GD&K Group. Mr. Włodzimierz Jędruszak, representative of FISHEYE Property Establishment, is full of optimism. "Surely, we have hit the bottom. However, in recent months there were several major lease contracts signed in Kraków. Hewitt rented the whole floor (ca. 2,000 sq.m.) in Diamante Plaza office building, and the company declares they are after more office space in there. Similar revival can also be noticed among minor tenants. This raises hopes that the market is warming up, and that now it's going to be better and better," says Mr. Jędruszak.
|
