CBRE: small and medium sized retail parks to drive Romanian market’s expansion

The 172,000 square meters added this year to the stock of modern retail space in Romania consisted of large-sized projects initiated last year. Still, investors have turned cautious in the meantime, and an appetite for small and medium sized projects is already visible, according to the quarterly report of the real estate consultancy firm CBRE.

The retail space stock in Romania reached 3.94 million square meters at the end of the third quarter.

About 90,000 sqm were delivered in the first nine months, and another 82,000 sqm will be delivered in the fourth quarter.

The key projects opened in January-September were Dambovita Mall and Shopping City Targu Mures, NEST Miercurea Ciuc, and NEST Oradea. In the fourth quarter, another 82,000 sqm will be delivered in Alba Iulia, Baia Mare, Brasov, Slobozia, Sibiu, and Timisoara, by the opening of new projects or expansion of existing ones. The total stock will thus head towards the threshold of 4 million sqm.

An interesting development is the increased activity of the retail and related services companies (courier and logistics) on the industrial spaces segment, where they rented over 300,000 sqm of spaces and accounted for 50% of total transactions in the first nine months of this year.

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