Colliers: “More and more real estate investors in regional cities are starting to contract professional property management services”

Colliers Romania manages over 680,000 square meters of real estate in Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Timisoara, Brasov, and Arad, of which 590,000 square meters are offices and the rest industrial warehouses, providing asset management and administration services for annual budgets of over 26 million euro. In regional cities, Colliers consultants are seeing increasing numbers of developers and owners choosing to optimize building management and maintenance costs by outsourcing such services.

“Regional cities grew strongly in recent years, with a significant stock of new Class A buildings and tenants accustomed to a high standard of quality and efficiency, who want their teams in Cluj, Timisoara or Brasov to have the same quality of service and office space as teams in Bucharest, Warsaw, Paris, London, etc. Thus, the competition for quality of service and efficiency is not local, but rather regional or even global.  These comfort components matter at the moment, especially as each company tries to maintain or improve its team spirit, and therefore its office work, even in the new paradigm of 2-3 remote working days per week. Equally, multinationals expanding outside the capital’s labour market also want to maintain the standard they offer their employees”, explains Alexandru Atanasiu, Deputy Head | Property Management & Construction Services at Colliers Romania.

“This way – continues the Colliers consultant – the office is no longer just a workspace, but a destination, an experience, where the quality of services, the location, the mix of services in the area and in the building, the development of a community are essential elements for increasing the use of space and increasing productivity”.

“The trend observed in regional cities such as Cluj-Napoca and Timisoara, where there are over 730,000 square meters of space in Class A and B office buildings, shows the increasing need of landlords for a professional property management provider, coming with very good services and lower costs than in-house management. The way we do business generates significant savings for companies that have chosen to outsource their property management to us, given the team’s expertise, the skills and experience we have built up over 12 years in the business, the procedures we have developed, the implementation of best practices, both locally and regionally, and our IT systems”, adds Alexandru Atanasiu.

In Cluj-Napoca and Timisoara, cities where Colliers manages almost 100,000 square meters of office and industrial space, companies predominantly in the IT&C, professional services, manufacturing and energy sectors have chosen to outsource their property management.

Last year, Colliers increased its portfolio of managed properties by 135,000 square metres in 5 new office projects, bringing its total portfolio to 680,000 square metres. Currently, the company has a total of around 400 tenants in the buildings it manages in Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Timisoara, Brasov and Arad, and the value of the properties in its portfolio exceeds 1 billion euro.