One of the subjects discussed by the Logistics Panel of experts held at CEDER 2023 was the inclusion of small-sized warehouses, of up to 1,000 sqm, in the developers’ product portfolio.
Șerban Juverdeanu, Head of Development at GlobalVision, pointed out that building such small warehouses was difficult and that he did not see a promising future for this trend. “We’re more than happy to accommodate such areas, but we would rather keep our standards.” He added: “You can’t fill up a 20,000 or 50,000 sqm building with units of 1,000 sqm. […] The costs are huge.” Later in the discussion, he concluded that “there can be exceptions, but you can’t build a portfolio out of that”.
To counterbalance this opinion, Ana Dumitrache, Managing Director at CTP Romania, said CTP already had this type of product in their portfolio, specifically in their project in the North of Bucharest, and intended to replicate this development in the future. “We have two buildings. They are smaller buildings with smaller units, totally different than the rest of the products we are doing. And at the standards, […] top-notch as we are used to do it; it’s very well received by the market.”
Ana confirmed that this type of product, of 300 to 1,000 sqm, was very different from big logistics and needed to be developed specifically as a “concept of small building from the layout base […]. This is super important, not to turn a large warehouse of 40,000 sqm into small spaces because it’s going to be […] not the best quality.” She concluded that “we shall see if the market is ready to receive such a product. Clients are willing to pay for this, and they’re paying far higher rents than what we were discussing before.”
