Állítsd be, hogy az Economx az elsők között legyen a Google-találatokban!
You have been present on the real estate market for twenty years, practically from the start, and have tried yourself in almost all fields; have engaged in property administration, investment, development, consulting, sales, and have assisted a series of booms and busts. What is the direction of the market today? Where are we heading under
the shadow of economic slowdown and subprime-crisis?
We have made a huge leap forward in all fields. Progress is tremendous, lots of homes were built - although their quality is another issue; fi nancing environment has changed, and a circle of professional property investors has also evolved. Nevertheless, the expansion has brought up new questions, the answers to which are only being learnt nowadays by the market players. Take, for example, the most venturesome fi eld, home-building. There is a very fi ne line between success and failure. A gruesome amount of money needs to be invested in a project by the time you can acquire a legally binding, executable building licence. Decisions, however, have to be made right at the start in questions fundamentally determining future operation that only become relevant in a few years time. This is the case, for example, with the anomalies of the articles of association, and that is only one among the professional practices which haven't gained enough attention among developers yet.
Does this mean that specialisation is the right way to follow by developers? Nonetheless a number of investors put themselves to the test in more than one fields.
Of course, since diversifi cation lowers the risk. However the success of property development highly depends on the lore of places, in a broader sense. For obtaining a building permit, you have to know the local government, the chief architect's offi ce, and have to be familiar with the regulations, the residents, the customs, and the local enterprises. And even then, there are lots of obstacles, and ever fewer developers.
Doing ever greater developments.
This is completely normal, due to the complexity of the genre. The risk is great and the rate of return is at least dubious, especially in a fi eld which still lacks up-to-date regulations and stimulation in terms of the renovation of old monuments, to which the current system provides no inspiration. It is easy to bring things down and pull other things up instead, but the appeal of Budapest will not gain from these investments. There are, however, still no solutions for protecting our architectural heritage and yet enable it to meet today's expectations.
Are you referring to the Jewish Quarter?
The state of those houses is stunning, but there is no viable solution within reach. Although the architects are able to work out alternatives, the regulatory environment is not prepared to handle the opposition between the city protectors and the developers. Such is the case also with the creation of special edifi ces, be it a construction of a new building or a reconstruction of an older one. The market is still short of answers to these questions, even though the heavy reserves lay not in building in the empty sites, but renovating and rehabilitating the occupied ones.
Office boom and plaza fever - how long can this rate of growth be kept up?
Supply and demand never expand side by side, but no matter how low the rate is with which the economy increases, there is always an inner, organic expansion in demand, stemming from the operation of the companies. Hungary is a preferred location in the field of international outsourcing, and this spurs signifi cant demand in the offi ce market. Investor interest is also intensive, even towards those compounds that are not fully rented out. We can build class A offi ces and shopping centres, we have already given proof of that, but these investments are too plain. I think that the time has come for projects that cannot be completed by the investors alone, projects that require the contribution of local players and the local governments representing them.
The city is lacking conference and concert centres, club like sport centres, cultural centres embedded in environments that can generate profit. We can move on with projects that give way to something extra beside their main function, either related to the arts or sports. Nowadays a man of mould is not even let in the new office buildings. These facilities are closed like the phalanstères, but the adoption of new functions would make their environment not only livelier, but also more open. This could also blur the sharp differentiation between work and leisure. The market will inevitably develop in this direction in my opinion; whether this will happen sooner, or later depends only on the cooperation of the developers and the local governments.
