CEE gears up for increased investment activity in H2

The Avison Young network is expanding in CEE and as the firm’s Budapest-based principal Benjamin Perez Ellischewitz explained, more announcements can be expected in 2021.

His firm, Limehouse, formed an association with Avison Young earlier this year and Ellischewitz said that despite the pandemic and the prospect of a few challenging months ahead, the CEE market’s fundamentals are still sound.

Although there has been a dip in investment volumes he does not expect this will last beyond the summer.

Nevertheless, the market is currently polarised between investors that favour core products that are very liquid and those that prefer more opportunistic deals and are currently awaiting a market repricing, he explained to Real Asset Insight’s Richard Betts.

“I think sellers and buyers will at some point have to come together in terms of pricing and expectations and I will hope that we will see that taking shape by mid-year or by the Summer,” he said.

Sector preferences in CEE are in line with those elsewhere, notably, investors are keen on logistics property.

And a new development is the attraction of institutional scale residential property. In Poland, investors are more advanced in this respect but elsewhere in CEE are now becoming more open to residential and more transactions can be expected soon.

Click on the video above to watch the full interview or listen to the podcast below.