Sparkassen Immobilien yesterday launched the first mall in Southern Bucharest, Sun Plaza, an investment worth a total of 150 million euros. Sparkassen Immobilien, the real estate investment division of Erste Bank, has a 500 million-euro investment budget to develop projects that mainly target Bucharest, as well as other cities in the country on the shopping centre segment.

"We have recently bought the Novotel Hotel. We are now launching the Sun Plaza retail project, a 150 million-euro mall and will fund the development of an 80 million-euro office building in the Piata Victoriei area," stated Holger Schmidtmayr, a member of Sparkassen Immobilien board of the directors.

"We also want to buy the BCR offices once they have been put up for sale. Other than that, the remaining investment will go to Bucharest projects, but we are also thinking of retail investments outside the capital city," he added.

Sparkassen Immobilien focuses predominantly on the hotel segment, office buildings and retail space. "Thirty-five percent of our investments go to towards office space, 20% to each of the retail, residential and office space segments, while very little goes towards the logistic space segment," Schmidtmayr explained.

The Austrian investors have been the main buyers on the Romanian real estate market over the last few years. Funds like CA Immo, Europolis and Immofinanz have bought almost everything they could over the last three years from office buildings to logistic projects.

Moreover, some of the Austrian funds decided to become involved in real estate projects even before construction had started, by sealing forward-purchase agreements. Such agreements entail buying a project in its early stages and developing the later stages based on funding from real estate funds.

Sparkassen Immobilien entered the real estate market this year, being on