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Galleries Louvre sprouts up in Radlická

Project part of Mayfield's development in Prague 5

By Kimberly Ashton
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
September 19th, 2007 issue

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST
Mayfield's Galleries Louvre project will offer more than 4,000 square meters of new office space to Prague 5 businesses.
Mayfield

Na Příkopě 22
Prague 1
Tel.: 221 451 640
E-mail: info@mayfield.cz
Web: mayfield.cz

A decade ago, Prague 5 was a relatively unattractive place for business. As tourists poured money into downtown shops, places like Smíchov remained grimy, industrial and largely ignored.
But that all changed when forward-thinking developers set their sights on Anděl — now the area’s crown jewel — and Nové Butovice, a thriving office park.
Today, other developers are looking for sites along this new business corridor, which runs along  the metro’s B line.
Mayfield, a subsidiary of the UK multibillion-euro company the Fordgate Group, is placing its money on Radlická — in between Anděl and Nové Butovice — as the next business hotspot. Mayfield is now building Galleries Louvre, a 13-million-euro ($19.7-million/358.4-million Kč), 4,517-square-meter (48,620-foot) office building a stone’s throw from the Radlická metro stop, on Kutvirtova street.
“You have to look historically at what has happened in Prague 5,” says Mark Oram, managing director of Mayfield’s Prague office. “Smíchov really took off seven years ago ... [and now] there is not a huge amount of additional room there.”
So, he says, Mayfield has been looking up and down the B line corridor for the past four or five years. Radlická is “the next best thing” between Anděl and Nové Butovice, Oram adds. Not only is it highly accessible by both metro and car, it also has a leisure center and new residential developments close by. It’s so attractive, in fact, that ČSOB planted its new, huge headquarters right outside the metro station’s doors.
Also within walking distance to the metro is the construction site that will be the Galleries Louvre office building come next year. Construction started on the site this past May, and it should be open for tenants by July 2008, according to Oram.
“The current office market in Prague is extremely buoyant, with vacancy rates at their lowest levels for over six years,” says Andrew Thompson, head of the office team at Cushman & Wakefield, the company in charge of leasing the site to tenants.
One advantage of the Galleries Louvre project, Thompson says, is that it will allow midsize companies that may not be able to fill other large buildings in the area, a stronger sense of identity. It will also feature underground parking, a café and a terrace.
The cost will be 1,475 euros per square meter per month, according to Petr Markvart, a negotiator in Cushman & Wakefield’s office department.
If all goes well with the Galleries Louvre project, then Mayfield plans to build a 12,000-square-meter building, also at Radlická, called Hermitage.
“Of course, we’re testing the market with Louvre,” Oram says, adding that the plan for now is to move on to Hermitage in 15 to 18 months. But, he says, “If Louvre didn’t work, we’d hold fire [on Hermitage].”
Oram says he hopes the Louvre and Hermitage projects will equal in stature the first project Mayfield undertook here, Prague Gate in Chodov. Completed in 2002, Prague Gate is a 13,000-square-meter office building and 200-room hotel complex in Prague 4.
Mayfield was established here in 1995 to carry out construction of this project. Now the 12-person, Prague-based team, led by Oram and Lenka Šišláková, has expanded its reach to cover eight countries: the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania and Ukraine.
It’s now eyeing Ukraine as a market that has the opportunity to yield high returns, but also comes with higher risk. There is also a lot of interest in Romania and Bulgaria, two other potentially hot markets, he says.
The Central European market — the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary — “can be taken as being somewhat more mature now” and therefore yielding “more modest returns” than it has in the past, Oram says.
To balance its portfolio, Mayfield is undertaking projects in Germany, an established economy that has recently started to pick up, to offset any risk in Ukraine.
The company’s portfolio is somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 million euros and is part of the Fordgate Group’s 5.5 billion euro portfolio.
“I think [Mayfield’s] results are starting to pay off for them,” Oram says. He credits the company’s success to his “fantastic team of people and great support from our company in the United Kingdom.”

Kimberly Ashton can be reached at kashton@praguepost.com


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