TheWrap: This is the Year

One-fifth of the nearly 700 respondents to CBRE's European Investor Intentions Survey 2026 were either from, or were targeting CEE. And their answers suggest a lot of activity planned for this year. 58% plan acquisitions while 48% intend to dispose of more assets than in 2025. That’s 7% more than the European average. Just 10% plan no sales at all, which is the lowest figure ever recorded. (It was 22% two years ago). Warsaw came out in third place in the competition to be Europe's most attractive cross-border investment city. It was behind London and Madrid, but leapfrogged Barcelona, Milan and Paris. Czech CRE investment hit nearly €4.4 billion in 2025.

INVESTIKA Real Estate Fund is making its German market entry by buying an 89.9% stake in Höfe am Brühl, a 50,500 sqm shopping center in Leipzig. Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield Germany stays in as minority shareholder and continues managing the asset — a JV structure INVESTIKA tends to use for entries into new markets. Closing is expected by June. The tenant mix includes Media Markt, H&M, Müller and Lidl across 130 shops, plus 4,900 sqm of offices and 31 apartments. INVESTIKA is now active in Czechia, Poland, Austria, Croatia and Spain with a total of 65 assets and an AUM of over CZK 25 billion with 100,000+ investors.

NEMO fund posted a 6.12% return in 2025, grew its managed portfolio to CZK 5.7 billion and kept building occupancy above 96%. Its latest acquisition — Panorama Business Center, an eight-storey building opposite the National Museum with tenants including VZP, Takeda and Sumitomo — fits the strategy. Investor count rose 25% to 15,145.

Net new take-up in Czech industrial reached 1.3 million sqm in 2025 — or nearly 2.2 million sqm gross including renewals and renegotiations. In its latest report, 108 Real Estate writes that developers completed 771,000 sqm of new space last year. But it’s 2026 that will look impressive if the planned 1.4 million sqm come through. And yet, developers remain cautious: new starts are overwhelmingly pre-let, and a third of the 2026 pipeline consists of six mega-halls, the largest being Panattoni Park Cheb. Prague’s ring road leads the way on rents, averaging €7.13/sqm/month. Meanwhile, Olomouc assets are nearly €2 off that pace..

Kuehne+Nagel is the first tenant at CTPark Holubice near Brno, opening a 7,100 sqm distribution center serving as a 3PL hub for the Central European market. The global logistics operator already occupies space at CTPark Ostrava. CTP runs seven industrial parks, two office campuses and one mixed-use complex in South Moravia.

At a time when the residential developer Central Group had a record 3,200 flats in the pipeline, its director Dušan Kunovský has decided to delay construction on 1,000 of them. Claiming the market is overheated, he said the construction sector needs the equivalent of a cold plunge. “This hysterical raising of prices for construction work and materials of late has fundamentally raised the prices on new flats for buyers. But we don’t want that,” he said yesterday. Kunovský reminded journalists that Central Group did the same thing back in 2022. “That time, it was a shock for everyone and they wondered why we were doing it. But within 3-6 months the whole market followed us.” Is that really such a good comparison, though? 2022 was a terrible year for developers, thanks to the worst inflation in a generation and interest rates of 7%.

Drees & Sommer and NEURA Robotics have struck up a strategic partnership to develop buildings designed specifically for human-robot coexistence. "Sensorized Environment" embeds real-time monitoring of light, motion, temperature and sound into building infrastructure, creating what they call a "digital nervous system" for the structure. Their first target? Bathrooms (aye, there’s the rub…). Because that’s where high usage, hygiene demands and chronic staff shortages make a strong case for automation. Cognitive robots would detect contamination, refill consumables and flag technical issues before failures occur. The longer-term play extends to nursing facilities, airports, production halls and office buildings.

Crescon has broken ground on Rezidence Starochodovská in Prague 11 — 81 apartments plus two ground-floor commercial units. Nearly 75% sold before construction started, a typical scenario for Prague’s hot resi market. Completion is set for end of 2027, with Emexkon as general contractor. The company is also building in the Czech mountains, namely a project called Zahrádky 1000 in Pec pod Sněžkou where 33 ski-slope apartments are under construction.