Floreasca Park wins double awards for Best Office Building in Bucharest

Real Estate developer Portland Trust has won in the last week two very important awards for Floreasca Park, the greenest office building in Bucharest: SEE Best Office Building of the Year at Central and Eastern European Quality Awards (CEEQA) in Warsaw and Office Development of the Year at Europaproperty SEE Real Estate Awards Gala & Forum Romania.

2014-04-14 12:06:57

Robert Neale, owner and managing director of Portland Trust collected the award for SEE Best Office Building of the Year for the Floreasca Park project at the awards ceremony at the most prestigious industry event, Central and Eastern European Quality Awards (CEEQA). The gala took place on the 8th of April in Warsaw and was attended by over 600 property development and real estate professionals from over 40 countries in the region.

"Floreasca Park came in on time and on budget and is in process of achieving an EXCELLENT BREEAM rating. The points achieved were fractionally short of the level required for OUTSTANDING, mainly due to the extensive underground geothermal heat pump system. This system is the first such system adopted in any major office building in Bucharest and will produce significant financial savings to the occupiers of the building as up to 40% less energy is used in heating and cooling", stated Robert Neale. Also, Neale describes the system as "not just another green gimmick. It is substance over form-it really makes an impact. It is an effective and practical innovation that brings direct savings to tenants and reduces the significant carbon footprint of the development".

Robert Neale highlighted that the office building was almost 40,000 sqm net leasable and Portland Trust managed to attract high profile tenants like Oracle, BASF, Ursus and Allianz with an excellent leasing job done by The Advisers / Knight Frank team lead by Horatiu Florescu. Neale also thanked the professionals on the development team: the engineers were WSP, Chapman Taylor the architects, the contractor was Bog'art and Sentient the cost and project managers.

Floreasca Park project was developed by Portland Trust and joint venture partner Ares Management.
The second award won this week was at the Europaproperty SEE Real Estate Awards Gala & Forum Romania, which took place in Bucharest on April 10th 2014 where Floreasca Park won Office Development of the Year. This 9th edition of the commercial real estate awards event rewards the most outstanding and accomplished projects, companies and individuals throughout the SEE region in 2013.

The two awards SEE Best Office Building of the Year and Office Development of the Year are not the only awards that Portland Trust has won for Floreasca Park project. In 2013, at the 8th annual edition of SEE Real Estate Awards Gala & Forum for year 2012, organized by Europa Property, real estate developer Portland Trust has won SEE Green Building Awards-"BREEAM Design-Phase Certificate"-for the office development Floreasca Park and also in 2007 Best Office building for Bucharest Business Park.

Floreasca Park is the fifth of Portland Trust office developments in Bucharest. With its approximately 40,000 sqm of office space, Floreasca Park represents 15 percent out of a total of 260,000 sqm of office space built and leased by the company since 1999.

Central and Eastern European Quality Awards-CEEQA is owned and organized by CEE Insight Forum in association with the Financial Times to encourage and recognize business excellence of the New Europe commercial real estate sector. In its eleventh year, The CEEQA Awards are widely recognized as the most important annual industry awards for business achievement in commercial real estate investment and development across 18 countries in Emerging Europe: Romania, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, Albania, Bosnia&Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia.

Portland Trust was established in 1997 to develop high quality, institutional, commercial real estate assets throughout Central Europe. Portland Trust has offices in Prague-Czech Republic and Bucharest-Romania and has focused on commercial projects. In Romania there has been a specific focus on the development of prime quality office buildings and also one large, light industrial estate. Portland has completed over 400,000 sqm of net leasable space of new buildings.