SOFIA (Bulgaria), January 27 (SeeNews) -The volume of commercial real estate transactions in 2019 was just over 220 million euro ($242.5 million) - the lowest in the past three years, real estate consultancy MBL said on Monday.
The consultancy provided no comparative figures for the past three years in a quarterly retail space market overview.
Bulgaria's Varna, located on the Black Sea coast, became the city with the highest retail space provision rate in the country following a new opening in 2019, it noted.
Following the new opening, the retail stock in Varna amounts to 123,000 sq m or a provision rate of 341 sq m per 1,000 people, MBL said.
Varna was followed by the capital Sofia and the city of Plovdiv, which offered retail space provision rates of 285 sq m. and 208 sq m, respectively.
There were no other deliveries of shopping centres in 2019 and none are planned for 2020, according to MBL. In the fourth quarter of 2019, the stock of retail space in modern shopping centres in Bulgaria amounted to 817,200 sq m, of which 411,400 sq m in Sofia.
The overall vacancy rate fell to 9.3% in the fourth quarter of 2019 from 9.7% in the previous quarter, as the vacancy rate in Sofia fell to 9.1% to 8.4%. The vacancy rate outside of Sofia edged up to 10.3% from 10.1%. The decrease in the vacancy rate in Sofia was due to new tenants such as PEPCO, JYSK, CCC and Billa opening large-sized stores in certain shopping malls, MBL noted.
The volume of commercial real estate transactions in 2019 was just over 220 million euro ($242.5 million) - the lowest in the past three years.
($ = 0.9071 euro)