Banks go local in pursuit of developers

Banks are currently awash with money and are not short of projects to lend it to. It is therefore of no surprise that many office developments in many cities are currently being financed. Office developers are trying to meet tenant demand by constructing many new projects, with the largest of them having many projects under construction in many attractive locations at the same time.

“We are in many regional cities with but our strongest presence is in Warsaw. Of course, we’re looking for real estate in city centres, in recognised business districts. However, we are also trying to create new office locations, for example on ul. Beethovena in Warsaw. We want to offer the tenant something new,” explained Grzegorz Iwański, the director of finance at Echo Investment during the 9th Hotel and Office Investment Conference organised jointly by Eurobuild Conferences and the city of Łódź. “We are no strangers to the creation of new locations. We are also focusing heavily on finding a place in regional cities, such as Gdańsk, Kraków, Katowice and Łódź. These are our first choice centres,” said Jarosław Jukiel, the financial director at Ghelamco Poland. “We want to have a presence wherever there is demand,” he added. “What are the projects that banks are most willing to finance?” asked Hubert Mańturzyk, the head of debt & structured finance at CBRE while he was moderating the panel discussion on the sources and methods of financing commercial projects. “We’re mainly focusing on construction projects from almost every sector – from shopping centres, offices and warehouses, to hotels. When it comes to location, we finalised a lot of transactions in Warsaw last year and now we are moving into the regional cities,” said Łukasz Białecki, the head of real estate financing at Bank Pekao. “We’re financing a lot of residential projects in many cities across Poland. We also finance commercial projects mainly through construction loans, which makes up half of our annual exposure. We’re currently heavily involved in financing warehouse and office projects. And as for office projects, we have recently financed construction work in Wrocław, Kraków and Łódź. We are simply following our clients,” said Grzegorz Trawiński, a board member at MBank Hipoteczny.

More information: EurobuildCEE