Shopping centres ward off crisis

2010-08-31

Retail properties managed to shrug off the economic crisis and came out unscathed from it. The situation in the office and warehouse space market looks a lot worse, though, as reported by Rzeczpospolita.
On average, a mere 2% of space offered in shopping centres located in Poland's largest cities remains vacant. The best shopping centres have no premises available at all, while those which rank lower have vacancy rates at around 5-8%. According to analysts, demand for retail space is expected to grow in the nearest future, and, consequently, the number of vacant premises will continue to go down.
However, the condition of the office space market is poorer. Currently, Wroclaw has the lowest ratio of vacant office space (5.9%), while Lodz is at the opposite end of the scale with around 30% of available office space without tenants. In Warsaw, unoccupied offices account for around 9% of office space available, while a year earlier, the vacant office space ratio for Poland's capital was approx. 5.8%. Property developers remain highly cautious about launching new projects, especially in the regional cities. As at the end of June 2010, contracts concerning the lease of around 80,000 m² of office space were concluded, which confirms that the market is fairly strong, but it is incapable of absorbing the entire volume of office space on offer. The coming years are likely to see an increase in vacant office space in many cities, including Krakow, Poznan, Lodz and Wroclaw, with Warsaw being the only exception where vacant space is likely to fall slowly.
As far as unoccupied warehouse space is concerned, the highest ratios are reported in locations within 30-50 km from Warsaw's centre and in Krakow, where around 25% of available warehouses are vacant. Many unoccupied warehouses are also available in Piotrkow Trybunalski, Szczecin, Rawa Mazowiecka, etc., but there are also places where warehouse space becomes sparse, as is the case in Warsaw, Lodz and Tri-City - developers will first launch new projects in these cities. However, in most cases these warehouses will be built to order of specific tenants, not for speculative purposes.

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