Emboldened by successfully filling its Bratislava Business Center (BBC) office complex with high profile tenants months before opening, the real estate agency HB Reavis is preparing a multi-functional project that will be eight times as large as the BBC.
The 15,000-square-meter, 500 million Sk ($16.5 million) BBC, on the corner of Prievozská and Plynárenská streets, will open in January with 29 tenants. That list includes nine tenants committed to at least 350 square meters of office space, plus services such as notary, express mail, copy center, and florist. SlovTel, the mobile phone consortium led by France Telecom, the Swiss telecommunications company Landis & Gyr, and the international accounting and consulting firm Deloitte & Touche are the three largest tenants. Each of them will have at least 1,100 square meters, and together they will account for 51 percent of the rented space.
Ivan Chrenko, manager at HB Reavis, said lease contracts range from three to 15 years, with an average of eight years. Other tenants include Komerční Banka, Sony, Alcatel, and the news agency Reuters, who required 150 of the building's 530 telephone lines.
"They've fitted in all our demands," Jan Krcmar, Reuters' Bratislava bureau chief, said of HB Reavis. "They were fast. They gave us a fairly fixed schedule. It's a bit out of town, but we had no alternative."
Chrenko said a group of investors intends to address further Bratislava's lack of top standard property options with an ambitious project on an 80,000-square-meter plot of land recently purchased from the city. It has not yet been determined whether Asset, the banking software company that backed the BBC, will be among the new project's investors. As for the new property's precise location, Chrenko would only say it is "300 meters from the Danube and 500 meters from the Castle."
The complex, which will amount to a total of 120,000 square meters and cost nearly 4 billion Sk ($130 million), will have more varied use than the BBC. Chrenko said just 45 percent of it will be office space, with 30 percent devoted to shops and services and the remaining space divided between residential and hotel space. Construction on the project, which will provide tenants with 2,000 to 3,000 parking spaces and 3,000 to 4,000 telephone lines, is expected to start in 1997 and be finished early in 1999, according to Chrenko.
