Bucharest office deliveries hit record in Q3 2021

New offices totalling 132,200 sqm were delivered on the Bucharest market during the third quarter, making it the best ever in terms of supply, while 9-months deliveries reached 178,000 sqm, according to real estate consultancy Cushman & Wakefield Echinox.

The new office supply from the first three quarters has already exceeded last year’s full results. The biggest delivery was Portland’s J8 Office Park with 46,000 sqm in leasable spaces. Forte’s U-Center I covers 32,800 sqm, while Globalworth Square was the third-largest project with 29,100 sqm.

Bucharest’s office stock reached 3.13 million sqm at the end of September, while the vacancy rate reached a 5-year high of 14.8 percent.

Office leasing gained 33 percent year-on-year to 212,900 sqm, mostly driven by technology and healthcare companies.

“The office participation rate is slowly starting to increase as in the first half of the year we have noticed that almost 50 percent of employees were working mainly from the office, compared to 36 percent in May-December 2020. Moreover, a higher number of employees want to return to the office for at least 2 days a week. In this context, we see more and more companies that have configured their strategies pertaining to how employees work and therefore how they use the office space, which creates more predictability in the office market,” said Mădălina Cojocaru, Partner, Office Agency, Cushman & Wakefield Echinox.

Some 280,000 sqm of new offices are expected on the local market in the next 18-24 months including One United Properties’ One Cotroceni Park (phases I & II), @Expo by Atenor, River Development’s Sema Parc, AFI Europe’s AFI Tech Park II and Skanska’s Equilibrium II.

In the transactions market, offices generated new deal volumes of close to €340 million in the first nine months.