West Station, a joint venture between Polish State Railway and the Slovak developer HB-Reavis, is set to break ground in downtown Warsaw once all permits are in place. The €110m project involves the reconstruction of the Warsaw West station and the creation of 64,000 sqm of new retail and office space. The first phase of construction will get underway first, with work beginning on the station’s reconstruction. That should take roughly a year, while the first office building isn’t expected to complete until roughly 2015.
Polish State Railway has a 28.7-percent stake in the project, which will be sold once the project is completed. This is PKP’s third JV with private investors. It partnered with the Spanish developer Neinver on a railway station in Katowice and began another scheme with the Hungarian developer TriGranit in Poznań this year. PKP has 2,000 plots across the country and has signalled its interest in further partnerships.
“We’re preparing for new investments of this type. We already selected several locations,” says Jarosław Bator, managing director of the real estate department at PKP. “We see a lot of interest coming from the developers.”
