C&W: Czechs dominated commercial RE investment in 2018

The volume of commercial real estate investment in the Czech Republic reached more than €2.8bn for 2018, a strong result, albeit a 20 percent reduction compared to 2017. The year’s biggest transaction is the sale of CTP’s three industrial parks to Deka Immobilien for €460 million. Perhaps the biggest take-away, points out Cushman & Wakefield which has just released these numbers, is the fact that Czech investors invested almost €2bn of the total, or 65 percent of the total. Breaking down the figuresfurther, 60 percent of the total was invested in Prague. Cushman & Wakefield predicts that the market will continue to be "highly active" in 2019, thanks largely to the office sector as several major transactions are currently in the pipeline. The new report also claims that Asian capital will play an increasingly assertive role alongside Czech and Western capital.

“While the total volume of transactions completed in 2018 will decrease, this is not attributable to a lack of interest in commercial stock in the Czech Republic," says Michal Soták, Head of the Capital Markets Team at Cushman Wakefield. "By contrast, the market is very active and the interest of investors is not subsiding. The Czech Republic is becoming a mature international market, which is stable and sufficiently predictable for investors. The last two years were exceptionally generous with large transactions. A number of large portfolios were transacted over a relatively short time span, including CBRE GI and Letňany SC.”