The urban landscapes of Bulgaria’s major cities are set for big changes.
This emerged from panel discussions on skyscrapers and shopping malls on November 2 and 3 at the Real Estate and Investment Forum (RINFOR) at the Sheraton Hotel in Sofia.
Sofia chief architect Petar Dikov issued a cautionary message to investors and developers considering building skyscrapers to take account of land use regulations and the especially high costs of erecting skyscrapers.
Special technologies and deep excavations were required, he said, and he warned against such developments in traditionally residential areas where both the building operations and the eventual building would have a major disruptive effect on traffic flow and the lives of residents.
He said there were three skyscraper projects currently in development, including one in Todor Alexandrov Boulevard and one in Mladost, but it was difficult to say when construction would start because this depended on a number of factors, including the decisions by investors.
Dikov said that there were at least 10 other projects in the pipeline.
He said that people should first consult the city council before buying land for major developments to find out about the status of the land they intended using.
At the RINFOR discussion on shopping malls, Marin Zgurev, managing director of Densi Ltd, the developer of the 14 million euro Central Mall in Veliko Turnovo, said that two months after the mall opened, it was functioning very well.
There had been a slight delay for technical reasons and because the developers had wanted to open the mall with 100 per cent occupancy.
The mall was the first of its kind to open in a city other than one of Bulgaria’s larger ones. He said that his company was now targeting the development of smaller malls outside of Sofia. The aim was to provide malls that were aimed, not at being the biggest and most expensive, but at catering for the middle market.
Densi plans investments totalling about 120 million euro in building three shopping malls by spring 2009, most probably in the Black Sea city of Varna, Rousse on the Danube, and Pleven in northern Bulgaria. Construction was expected to start between February and April 2006, Zgurev said. He said that about 20 per cent of the projects’ financing would come from Densi’s own funds and the rest would be borrowed.
Petar Dudolenski, chief executive of RESB, the investment company of Cinema City International and the Aviv Group - both Israeli companies - spoke about the Mall of Plovdiv project, of which he is chief executive.
This mall, he said, would be a “typical north American mall” and would cover about 45 000 sq m. Tenants already participating in the Mall of Sofia were very interested in space in the Mall of Plovdiv.
He said that there were “definitely not” too many malls in Bulgaria. If five to 10 years, every town in Bulgaria of 100 000 people would have its mall.
He said many big retail companies were not yet represented on the Bulgarian market. Zara, a major clothing retailer, had been looking at the Bulgarian market for two years in order to find a suitable “vehicle” for its goods.
Consumers were not yet used to shopping at a mall, but this would change.
“In five to 10 years time, the high streets will not be what they are today,” Dudolenski said.
RESB plans to launch a third shopping mall project in Bulgaria in 2008, to a value of about 40 million euro, of a scale of investment similar to that put into the Mall of Plovdiv. Cities under consideration for the next mall included Plovdiv again, Varna, Bourgas on the Black Sea, Stara Zagora, Rousse, Pleven, Blagoevgrad and Vidin.
Guy Speir, director of leasing and marketing at Quilan Private Golub, a giant in acquiring and developing shopping malls in central and eastern Europe, said that there were “fantastic opportunities” in Bulgaria, Romania and elsewhere in the Balkans.
“There is a huge amount of opportunity here. There is a great future for retail malls,” Speir said.
