However, the company wants to complete construction on the office building with a lettable area of 19,500 square meters by yearend and hopes to have it fully rented by then.
“The number of potential tenants with whom we started talks several months ago makes me comfortable with saying we will fully rent the building by the time construction is done,” said Marcin Lapinski, president of Skanska Property Romania.
It takes six to twelve months to sign an important deal but there is demand on the market for relocations and from companies that are just arriving in Romania, he added.
Rumor on the office space market has had it for a while that mobile phone operator Orange will lease some 10,000 square meters in the Green Court, but Lapinski says his company has not signed a contract with anyone but Schneider, set to move into Green Court in May 2015.
While the first building is almost done, work on the second has not begun yet. The company is watching how rental of the first building goes so it will make a decision based on that about when to begin work on the second. “It is possible to deliver the second building in the second quarter of 2015,” Lapinski said.
Green Court should consist of three buildings upon completion and offer 52,000 square meters of office space in an area which saw Sky Tower (Raiffeisen offices) and Floreasca Park (Oracle) delivered in the past year, and work started on Bucharest One tower (where Vodafone will move) a few weeks ago.
Skanska is actively looking for land in Bucharest both in the area where it is already working on its office buildings and in the center and west of the city. It will likely buy some more land by yearend and is looking for plots with quick access to subway lines. The number of potential buyers for large plots of land is rather low and prices have been stable in the past few years, Marcin Lapinski said.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)