People packing their bags and flying out to St Petersburg, Warsaw, and Prague this summer may not just be seeking an exotic vacation spot.
International property investors are inching back to emerging Europe, lured by prospects of higher returns in markets such as Poland, whose economy has held up relatively well in a global downturn, and Russia, which is bolstered by rising crude oil prices.
After posting strong growth for over 5 years, commercial real estate investments in emerging Europe had been a washout after Lehman Brothers’ collapse in Sept ‘08, with first quarter sales hitting a record low.
As our Moscow-based property reporter Yuliya Komleva and I wrote , major property fund managers such as Germany’s DekaBank, UK’s Aberdeen, and Hines from the United States have again looking for big buys in the region, although Hungary, Ukraine and the Baltics remain largely no-go zones.
Aberdeen Property Investors’ managing director for Russia, Charles Voss, even compared Russian cities favourably against London, where the once-booming UK financial services industry has been weakened by the global financial crisis.
