The recently accelerated development of the Romanian highway infrastructure has turned previously unattractive areas of Romania into new centres of interest. When asked about locations of interest and the opportunities brought by the new infrastructure, Ana Dumitrache, Managing Director of CTP Romania, said: “All the time I have this problem in identifying the infrastructure map versus [the] CTP map in Romania, because they overlap.” She highlighted CTPark Bucharest West as their top premium property, that she expects to grow even more in the future, adding: “It’s nearly zero vacancy in 800,000 sqm.”
Andrei Jerca, Managing Director at Eli Parks, talked about plans to build projects in Bacău, Brăila, and a third city in the same region, which will be connected to the future highway networks. “Our strategy is to follow the development of infrastructure.” He added: “Bacău for us is the project. We will develop there by the end of this year 45,000 sqm. And our strategy for the next nine months is to build roughly 120,000 sqm.”
Șerban Juverdeanu, Head of Development at GlobalVision, also talked about the strategy to establish key positions along the main corridors. He stated that developments outside of Bucharest pose different challenges than the ones in the capital, because the clients’ expectations are different. “Because we’re talking about a sub-market, […] a secondary city, people are very different. The habits are very different, the business is very different. You need to understand that you need to get inside of it and try to extract their needs. […] Most of them are just settling with what they have. But if you want to develop your business, […] you need to understand that you need a space that facilitates that for you.”
He also talked about Constanța as a major strategic point in the EU, despite the fact that developments there have seen somewhat of a slowdown due to the proximity to the conflict in the Ukraine. He said: “Very large operators around the world are very interested to administer and manage part of the docking areas. Anything you can offer in terms of an extended gates opportunity, since the port is crowded and closed out and there’s very little space for development, […]can help a lot the future development. It’s really going well.”
