“We've been looking for tenants for an office building for a year”

Primavera Development company, which has built, rented and sold one of the biggest office parks in the capital city, S-Park of northern Bucharest, has been seeking, for more than a year, tenants for a ten times smaller building located in the centre of Bucharest, where until two years ago office space would be rented as soon as work on it started.
“Office market conditions were intricate last year. During the entire 2009 we looked for tenants for the office building in Frumoasa – Calea Victoriei area, but we did not find any, so that we stopped construction works after we finalised the structure. We hope the office market starts moving this year since a lot of contracts expire,” Daniel Tanasoiu, one of the firm’s managers and shareholders, told ZF.
Rents stand at 14-14.5 euros/square metre/month, while the building has a 3,200 square metre area. S-Park, a project of above 30,000 square metres, had major tenants such as banks, telecom firms, and brewers at the time of completion.
“We can rent it to several tenants. Should we sign a pre-lease, the building would be finalised in six to eight months,” Tanasoiu said.
Primavera Development in 2007 collected around 104.5m euros from the sale of S-Park project, and the money was largely directed to land acquisition. The firm owns several plots of land in Bucharest for office and housing projects, as well as a plot of land in Sibiu, for the construction of a shopping centre.
On another note, on the residential market, Cefin Real Estate Alpha, the developer of Cortina Residence housing complex of Bucharest, owned by Cefin group and Heitman US investment fund, was officially declared insolvent in the wake of a decision by the Bucharest Court of Law, which appointed BDO Business Restructuring as the legal administrator.
Cefin Real Estate Alpha was due to develop a project made up of 270 apartments in Herastrau park area, but construction works were halted at the moment debts already amounted to 24m euros. “The majority shareholder in the project, Heitman investment fund, decided to withdraw. (…) A number of 114 apartments were sold,” Stefano Albarosa, Cefin CEO, told ZF.