Futureal has sold its Sziget Center shopping mall in Hungary to OTP Property Investment Fund as part of the deal that also saw the purchase of the Skypark office building.
After a successful repositioning, the 23,600 sqm centre located on the outskirts of Budapest has managed to lure high-profile tenants and tripled its lease income over the last two and a half years, thus triggering interest from one of Hungary’s biggest property investment funds.
The Sziget Center shopping mall is located in the heart of Csepel Island near Budapest, next to the Tököl airport. Its customer base is over 90,000 residents of the nearby settlements. The purchasing power of the area exceeds the Hungarian average and the consumption expenditures of the residents are forecasted to rise in the coming years.
The accessibility of the area is excellent by car and public transport, suburban train line (HÉV) is only a few minutes away. Sziget Center is currently the largest retail centre on the Csepel Island and the appearance of any competition is highly unlikely in the coming years.
Futureal purchased Sziget Center in 2014. Since then the shopping mall was successfully repositioned and has gained a well-balanced tenant mix. In the last three years the centre has attracted several international tenants increasing the leased area by over 9,000 sqm.
Among these newcomers there are international clothing store operators C&A and H&M, the decor and furnishing chain Jysk; clothing and household goods network Pepco, household products and cosmetics distributor Euro Family and electronics retailer Euronics.
“In the past two and a half years, we have managed to perform a successful repositioning of Sziget Center by attracting the largest brands and thus tripling leasing income of the shopping mall. The essence of this process was to strengthen the shopping centre’s convenience offering, while creating strong fashion supply. Thanks to the great infrastructure and location, the centre is expected to bolster its supply with further international retail chains and increase its popularity among the residents of the area, becoming a truly dominant local centre,” said Gábor Futó, founder of Futureal Group.
“The OTP Property Investment Fund has been of the most popular product of its kind in the last few years. However, we had to adapt to the changing trends on the real estate market. For this reason we have begun a long-term project of developing our investment portfolio. As part of this process we have been looking to purchase high-end logistic and retail properties with high yield potentials. We are confident that our latest investment, Sziget Center fits this bill perfectly. However, this purchase is not the last step in the process, we are still looking for projects in Budapest and the surrounding areas,” said Dr. Zsolt Barna, president and CEO of OTP Real Estate Investment Fund Management.
