Over the past five years CBRE, a global and national real estate consultant market leader, through the Building Consultancy Division, has managed the building projects of three production units in Romania with a surface area of approximately 50,000 sqm that totals customer investment of over €100 million.
CBRE Romania’s Building Consultancy Division was set up in 2012 by co-opting Gabriel Balaban, a technical consultant in construction, who has a 23-year experience in the real estate market. The division has expanded organically, diversifying its services, therefore over the past five years it has been responsible for managing the construction projects for three major factories in different areas of Romania: the helicopter plant in Brasov, Airbus Helicopters, the Kimball Electronic Systems Plant Electronics in Timișoara and recently the ThyssenKrupp Bilstein car plant in Sibiu.
“The expansion of the Building Consultancy Division allowed us to cover a wide range of projects, both geographically, through local teams and also by multidisciplinary specialization, advancing even further from the office space sector and being involved in the management of medical center building projects or industrial production units. Over the past five years, CBRE has provided project management and cost control services for factories totaling customer investments of over 100 million euros, with a cumulative surface area of approximately 50,000 sqm,” said Gabriel Balaban, Head of Building Consultancy, CBRE Romania.
The new facilty ThyssenKrupp Bilstein was inaugurated at the end of June and is an extension of the existing unit, aimed at producing shock absorbers for customers such as Daimler, Jaguar Land Rover or Porsche. The Thyssenkrupp investment has created over 350 new jobs for the plant from Sibiu, which now has about 1,000 employees.
Production companies generated 5 percent of the demand for logistics and industrial space registered in the first six months of 2019 when a total area of 112,500 sqm was traded. The modern inventory of logistics and industrial spaces in Romania reached the threshold of 4.04 million sqm in the first half of 2019, of which 55% is located in properties near the regional cities.
“Romania still needs investment in production and we estimate that over the next three to five years we will be witnessing investments of hundreds of millions of euros for the development of new plants or the expansion of existing ones. The need for infrastructure remains vital, especially in regions that are not in the western part of the country,” added Gabriel Balaban.
The CBRE Building Consultancy Department provides project management and cost management services for office, retail, industrial and residential areas as well as technical due diligence services, workplace consultancy, change management and other technical consulting services in real estate.
