The Aupark Tower office building adjacent to Aupark Shopping Center changed hands in December. Its developer, HB Reavis Group, sold it to Heitman European Property Partners IV for €85.6 million, the SITA newswire reported.
“We are pleased with Heitman’s interest in Aupark Tower which proves the continuing attractiveness of our assets,” said Pavel Trenka, HB Reavis’s chief operating officer and head of strategy, as quoted in a company press release. “The disposal proceeds will further increase our firepower to acquire new development opportunities, primarily in Poland and the Czech Republic.”
Launched in 2008, Aupark Tower comprises approximately 32,500 square metres of gross leasable area and is located at a busy road junction. It is connected to four major highway routes and is close to the historic city centre of Bratislava. The property is adjacent to Aupark Shopping Center, recently acquired by Unibail-Rodamco. The tower is fully leased and tenants include O2, AT&T, Eset, KPMG, Procter & Gamble and Sanofi-Aventis.
Caption: The Aupark Tower office building.
Photo: Sme - Oliver Filan

Output by Slovakia’s construction sector contracted by 11 percent in March to €328.8 million in a year-to-year comparison and was 3.2 percentage points worse than the results in February, the SITA newswire wrote, citing data from the Slovak Statistics Office.

The housing market in Slovakia is stabilising according to ČSOB bank analyst Marek Gábriš in his analysis of real estate price statistics published by the National Bank of Slovakia (NBS) on May 3, as reported by the TASR newswire.

The Alexis bookshop is one the shops that will be asked to vacate the Cvernovka building, a former industrial building in Bratislava that is one of the last historical industrial buildings on Páričkova street near the main bus station where thread was produced in the past. Only some the buildings on the street are protected as historic buildings.

PointPark Properties (P3) has successfully completed construction of a warehouse facility at PointPark Bratislava in Lozorno. The build-to-suit project spans a 50,000-square-metre parcel of land with a total building area of 26,349 square metres, including 1,600 square metres of office space, the company announced in a press release.

Bratislava homebuyers keep searching for smaller apartments or they want more rooms available in less or the same square metres, the Sme daily wrote in mid April, reporting on statistics about deposits on apartments and actual sales of apartments in new housing developments in Bratislava for the final quarter of 2011. Sme added that even though a drop in real estate prices has made buying apartments more affordable, people remain thrifty and reluctant to buy.

The average interest rate for mortgages has been rising in Slovakia as it was 4.76 percent in February 2011 and stood at 5.16 percent in February 2012. Ján Porázik, an analyst at Fincentrum, says the higher mortgage rates may be due to an amendment to the Act on Banks effective this January that requires banks to announce any changes in their interest rates two months in advance, the TASR newswire wrote.

Consumption of expanded polystyrene (EPS) as an insulation material in Slovakia is growing. During the first nine months of 2011 it grew by 3 percent year-on-year. The Association of Producers, Processors, and Users of Expanded Polystyrene in Slovakia reported the growth on November 2, 2011. Consumption of EPS rose by 10.5 percent to 30,000 tonnes in 2010, thus nearing the record of 30,050 tonnes set in 2008, the SITA newswire wrote.