Whilst last year the number of opened shopping centres equalled the one of traded projects, in 2008, though the number of new centres doubled, only three deals were done on this segment, in the first half, reads Business Construct magazine.
In terms of deliveries, the shopping centre market peaked this year despite the financial crisis that will impact the retail market in the following years, when there will be a drastically lower number of started projects.
Six expansions of existing projects and 17 finalised shopping centres, this is developers' new offer for buyers, filling around 700,000 built square metres in the wake of 1.2bn-euro investments. Carrefour can be found in 11 new hypermarkets opened in shopping centres, while Dan Ostahie opened at least six Altex stores and five Media Galaxy ones in the projects launched this year. The two companies are probably the most aggressive retailers in terms of expansion in shopping centres. In terms of cities, Bucharest was ahead of other cities.
Plans were changed this year, with buyers willing to take only much lower risks as a result of the tighter and more expensive financing.
The situation was similar for several investors that planned to sell their properties right after they were finished, but found out the annual yields potential buyers were willing to accept were around 200 points higher than they had expected, which resulted in 25% lower bids. The only investors who managed to exit two commercial businesses are Alexander Hergan and Siminel Andrei.
An important factor behind the slower investments on the segment of shopping centres is also the decline of Austria's Immoeast investment fund, which had sealed last year's most significant deals.
The fact that no significant shopping centre deals were concluded in the second half of this year will turn the new moves, which will probably unfreeze the market, into benchmarks for the new values of commercial spaces.
The market started hurting not only in terms of the lack of deals, but also from the perspective of retailers, which in their turn are having trouble expanding aggressively.
Another crisis fallout is represented by the fact that construction works started only for a low number of projects this year, a fact most likely to be reflected in the number of deliveries in 2010.
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