In a special address at the opening night’s gala dinner, Marcin Juszczyk, Chair of ULI Poland, welcomed attendees with a tribute: “We think about ourselves as trailblazers of the real estate industry in Poland. We educate a young generation of leaders in our industry. We drive sustainable development. We foster innovation, collaboration, the exchange of ideas, and champion best market practices.” He also acknowledged the tireless efforts, dedication, and commitments of those who have contributed to the ULI’s success in Poland. Joining him on stage were his predecessors and ULI Poland co-creators: John Banka, Senior Director at ARC Capital Markets; Soren Olsen, Managing Director of Logicenters Poland at NREP; Dorota Wysokińska-Kuzdra, Senior Partner at Colliers; and Małgorzata Poręba, ULI Poland’s Senior Manager, all beaming with pride for the organisation’s great achievements.

Diving deeper into the investment potential

Turning to even more investment trends, consumers, and particularly their spending, were said to be in the centre of attention this and next year. This would be a key factor driving Poland’s economic recovery, said Dorota Strauch, CEE Lead and Head of Research at Raiffeisen Bank International, in her macroeconomic outlook. While Poland is experiencing “not a spectacular” recovery, the recent influx of the EU funds from the once frozen recovery and resilience plan promises a positive impact on Polish investments in 2024. David Inskip, EMEA Head of Research at CBRE Investment Management, echoed this optimism, highlighting that “the coming year or two will present attractive window of real estate investment opportunities in the CEE, especially for residential assets and ESG-compliant assets in all sectors.”

Opportunistic funds having their moment

The marginal share of domestic institutional capital and the withdrawal of global capital is quite a challenge for the Polish real estate investment market. However, such a situation is very attractive to investors from our European region. “This was very evident last year in particular. Somewhat simplistically, if it were not for the capital flowing from the countries of the region, which was responsible for most of the transactions on the Vistula, the investment market would have almost frozen for good ,” emphasizes Dorota Wysokińska-Kuzdra, senior partner at Colliers.

Generating real value in business

Later, Antony Slumbers, an advisor and writer on proptech and space-as-a-service, stressed the necessity for real estate businesses to embrace human-centricity in the future. The revolutionizing concept assumes the use of advanced technologies to meet fundamental needs of people through prioritizing such aspects of real estate assets as health and well-being, ergonomics and comfort, technology integration, community and connectivity, flexibility and adaptability, and sustainability. According to his predictions, the most successful companies of the future are going to be “both deeply technical and deeply human centric,” while people’s responsibilities will lie in insightfully prompting AI, creating and curating machines, generating emotionally resonant user experiences, and ethical principles to navigate the technology. Meanwhile, the automation of processes will get coupled with even deeper understanding of human needs.

Afterwards, in a discussion session moderated by Izabela Makowska-Kwiecińska, Associate Director of Strategic Advisory, ESG, at Colliers, participants touched upon a few ESG-related topics, including their cooperation with financiers, and in-house capacity- and culture-building. “Banks are now coming to the realization that impact metrics are important also for their lending risk profiles. (…) We are seeing a phase where banks try to understand real estate also in the metric lens,” Elisabeth Herman Frederiksen noticed. “ESG is a part of our business now, we have no other choice. (…) As we plan and continue to prepare succeeding ESG reports, we hope that the process will become a habit in the future, and it will be an obvious thing to do regardless of the deadline for its preparation,” commented Jarosław Fiutowski, Board Member at Ghelamco Poland.

Public-private collaboration needs mutual trust

In the next segment, a unique view at the prerequisites for a game changing culture in the urban and city development settings was shared in an engaging presentation of Maria Vassilakou from Vienna Solutions, and a former Deputy Mayor of Vienna. She displayed a myriad of real life, innovative and inclusive city solutions worth recreating, including multigenerational developments. She also emphasized the necessity for polycentric city development, advocating for the creation of well-connected, local centres in every neighbourhood, complemented by green public spaces, as well as the importance of neighbourhood level works for decarbonization efforts.  It turns out that more and more real estate businesses recognize and benefit from the value of such approaches, as they increasingly co-facilitate and co-fund city transformations, in Austria and beyond.

This resonated with the perspective of Monika Konrad, Deputy Director of the Architecture & Spatial Planning Department at the City of Warsaw, who talked about the city’s strategies for collaborating with developers. She stressed the significance of upcoming legislation in bolstering such partnerships, particularly through the implementation of integrated investment plans which would soon enable the private sector to play a more active role in financing public investments. She also drew attention to the role of such partnerships in driving sustainability. “We must get prepared for climate change, both in mitigation and adaptation, and there is an enormous potential to do that in Warsaw. One of the greatest potentials can be found in  transforming brownfields,” she said. “We are now also working on our own green building standards. First, we will release one for municipal green buildings, and later we will work on standards for developers. (…) We also need to give people an opportunity to redevelop their housing in a way that decreases the energy costs.”

Future-ready conversions and conversations 

Could architects and designers become the catalysts for the global change making? They certainly should! In his closing keynote speech, focused on the forward-looking moves, Lukasz Platkowski, Managing Director at Gensler, outlined a number of new opportunities for today’s building sector that stemmed from the trend shifts spotted by the company’s experts worldwide. Those included more human connected experiences and more immersive, mixed-use designs, the evolution of workplaces into more compelling mixed-use destinations, as well the revival of stranded assets. He illustrated them with the example of Warsaw’s Służewiec district: “People travel all the way from there to the Wola district, where the mixed-use destinations are.” According to Platkowski, the novel approaches bear an enormous opportunity to decrease high vacancy rates in Europe and Poland. “Even governments offer incentives to do change the building’s use, although permitting keeps being difficult, and it is always challenging in such cases,” he said. Other shared trends included the creation of age-inclusive communities and lifetime designs, the buildings that actively give back to nature, and the design process that employs digital twins.