Building up and building out
Douglas J Noble, Orco's development and construction director for Poland and Hungary, speaks about the company's strategy, opinions about Poland's market as well as balancing the firm's Polish portfolio.
Piotr Paciorek: In the last few months many hotel market players have disclosed their investment plans. Does Orco have any particular plans regarding the hotel industry?
Douglas J Noble: We have a hospitality division which owns and operates luxury hotels. In Poland we have Hotel Regina and Diana Residence. Both are very popular and good for our company in terms of results. Going forward, we are a sponsor and manager of the new Endurance Fund for Hospitality, which has plans to acquire a lot more existing hotel buildings and to develop them into new hotels, not only in Warsaw but throughout Poland. We are a property developer more than a hotel operator, so when we acquire a hotel, we make a decision whether we also want to operate the hotel or if we want to find a company which would operate it for us. On top of that we are also looking for an opportunity to acquire specifically one-, two- and three-star hotels as we see them as a growth market in Poland. Most likely we would not be operating these hotels as we specialize in hotels of a higher standard.
What is your opinion of and experience with Poland's real-estate market?
There has been a lot of growth on the residential market, which has been the hottest in recent years and will continue to be very active. However, we see ourselves moving into office development, which will be growing in the next 10 years.
Furthermore, we have not experienced any problems from the investor's point of view. I would not say that Poland is a troublesome place to invest in; it's not different from any other.
Over the next few years Orco's image will be very closely associated with the major investment at Złota 44. To what extent are you balancing your portfolio with other projects?
A lot of people connect Orco Development Group with the Złota 44 project, but the truth is that we have a number of different projects apart from the Złota 44 development. High- quality housing projects such as Białołęka, Targówek, Ochota or Piaseczno are just some of them and vary from the most affordable level, right through to the luxury market. The Złota 44 project is a landmark investment for us and is good for many reasons, but we don't want to concentrate only on this end of the market.
How important is the Polish market for Orco?
Poland has massive potential, and the main difference between Poland and other countries in Europe is that Poland is a country with many large cities and its population is four times bigger than the average European country's. It has six or eight key cities, all the same in terms of development potential. This is why Poland is a critical market for us.
Does the company have plans to enter the Romanian and Bulgarian markets?
These are CEE markets so we are obviously looking at them with interest. We are considering such countries as Romania and Bulgaria as well as Ukraine. I believe we will focus on the residential market as we have done in other CEE countries.
