Alfa heads east

After the Alfa projects in Gdańsk and Olsztyn, Invest-JWK-Management, which is based in the Tri-city, will soon start construction work on its first shopping-mall development in eastern Poland's Białystok.

The necessary building permits have already been obtained and demolition works at the old Biruna factory, which will be replaced by Alfa Centrum, have begun.

According to Andrzej Radecki, the president of Invest-JWK-Managment, Białystok has until recently been a retail desert. "This is a more than 300,000-person city, which is a place for shopping for the whole population of the Podlaskie voivodship," he said. "We became familiar with such a scale of market influence in Olsztyn's Alfa, which is visited by 180,000 people every week, despite Olsztyn's population being just 170,000."

According to the investor, the Białystok mall should be completed in October 2008. The complex's retail area will consist of 35,000 sqm and it will be home to 140 shops, which will offer sporting and household products, clothes, multimedia products and a hypermarket. In addition, a seven-screen Helios cinema and a food-court will also be opened.

"We have already rented about 40 percent of the complex's retail space and three other lease deals will soon be closed," said Anna Bandurska, the director of the commercialization department at Invest-JWK-Management. In the future, the company plans to further develop the Olsztyn Alfa as well as constructing a shopping mall in nearby Grudziądz.