Europe’s third largest listed retail real estate company has expanded its development and refurbishment pipeline in 2024 to just over €650M across its Central and Eastern markets (CEE), the biggest retail investment programme in the region.
Resilient economic growth and rising household consumption in CEE is outpacing Western European countries, driving consumers through NEPI Rockcastle’s shopping centre doors and attracting growing numbers of international retailers, as well as local companies, seeking space within its largest portfolios in Romania and Poland and seven other regional markets.
Rüdiger Dany, NEPI Rockcastle CEO, said: “NEPI Rockcastle is carefully calibrating its development pipeline and financing to match the strong demand for space we’re seeing from international and local retailers in CEE, as well as from other sectors such as entertainment and hospitality. The region is under-supplied for retail space in comparison with Western Europe, but economies in CEE countries are growing at twice the rate…
“When these factors are combined with the central economic and social role our dominant shopping centres play in their markets, which is much more significant than in the rest of the EU, the megatrends and corporate strategy driving NEPI’s record financial results last year and our ambitious development and refurbishment programme, alongside the large acquisitions we made at the end of 2022, become very clear. We expect the current development pipeline to become accretive to earnings from 2027.”
NEPI Rockcastle, the largest owner, operator and developer of shopping centres in CEE, has 168,800sq m of development and refurbishment projects underway, or planned this year in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania.
