Mikor indul újra növekedésnek az ingatlanpiac? Takács Ernő, Inforádió, Aréna

Milyen évet zár 2023-ban az ingatlanpiac Magyarországon és Európában? Követi-e valamikor a hazai működőtőke-beruházásokat az ingatlanfejlesztések trendje is? Milyen értékű fejlesztések valósulnak meg az idén? Mi a helyzet az irodapiacon? Mi a home-office és a hibrid munkavégzés hatása az irodapiacra? Mekkora a túlkínálat a fővárosban? Várható-e funkcióváltás az alacsonyabb minőségi kategóriába tartozó irodaházak esetében? Hogyan állnak a lakóingatlan-beruházások, és milyen trendek jellemezték a használt lakóingatlanok piacát? Mennyit csökkent a hazai piac, és mi az európai visszaesés átlaga? Miért a lengyel piacon a legmagasabb, közel 70 százalékos a csökkenés volumene?

Milyen évet zár a hotelpiac, mennyit húzott a fővárosi hotelpiacon a beinduló beutazó turizmus, és hogyan teljesítettek a vidéki szállodák, amelyek inkább a hazai forgalomra építenek?

Mikor indulhat újra növekedésnek az ingatlanberuházások száma? Mennyire és mikor tudja a csúcsra járatott beruházás-ösztönzés magával húzni az ingatlanszektort? Hogyan változott az ipari ingatlanok és bérraktárak iránti kereslet vidéken és a fővárosban?

Hogyan pörgeti fel a szektort a jövőre várható gazdasági növekedés, a csökkenő infláció és a növekvő reálbérekből következő belső kereslet-növekedés? Milyen kamatszintek mellett indulhat be a lakóingatlanok piaca, és mennyit dob a lakóingatlanok iránti keresleten az új CSOK-konstrukció, azaz mikor jön el a lakáspiaci fordulat? Készen állnak-e az ingatlanfejlesztők a várhatóan növekvő keresletre?

Takács Ernő, az Ingatlanfejlesztői Kerekasztal (IFK) elnöke az Inforádió Aréna c. műsorában 2023.11.21-én. Podcast.

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Inforádió. Magyarország hírrádiója. A hírrádió.

Good afternoon to the listeners of the Arena, I am Tibor Exterde. In the studio we are joined by Ernő Takács, President of the Real Estate Developers Round Table Association. The conversation is now being recorded on the radio. Thank you for accepting our invitation. Have a nice day! – Have a nice day!

– He last sat here in November 2022, when he said that it could take longer than expected for the market to close back to the record levels of 2019. Another year passed, the market came back. – Unfortunately not yet, this backtracking has stalled.

Obviously, the war in Ukraine, then the energy crisis, then inflation, then the macroeconomic tightening that happened in Europe in that context, led to the whole world, so the global real estate market not only stalled, but fell in volume. On average, our experts put this breakdown at over 60%.

This means that the volume of real estate investment has fallen by this much, i.e. 60 per cent fewer real estate investment transactions have been realised, which is a very significant drop. In Hungary, the figure was lower, just over 40%, and there are countries in Central and Eastern

Europe, such as Poland, where the volume of real estate transactions fell by more than 70%, and was higher than 60%. – But what disappears from the market? The money, the vision? What seems to be falling back? – As a result of these external circumstances, people, investors, have obviously lost faith

And confidence in the future, and they are looking at the future differently, they see more risks, more circumstances that they see as being short-lived, so a few more months, a few more years, 10-12 months, until they are sure that they don’t want to commit to a real estate investment, so they are waiting.

The money is there, so it’s far from the same situation, thank God, as in 2008 or ‘9, when the money disappeared from the market, the money is there. Right now they’re holding it in government bonds or other things, government bonds, and they’re waiting

For the market to come back to a more stable vision, a more stable expectation, which they feel is less risky, and then they’ll hopefully come back to the market. – What does a real estate investor consider a stable market, when we have learned over the last

Three years that there is a covid, there is a war, nothing is stable. When these unexpected negative influences and circumstances disappear or are resolved. I’m thinking of the war in Ukraine, I’m thinking of the armed conflict in the gas zone, I’m thinking of the situation around the energy crisis, the dependence on gas,

The dependence on Russian gas, etc. etc. etc. the flow of. So when these problems, which many people and I have described as temporary, seem to disappear, or disappear, and then the other problems that we can already deal with,

That is, the business world, the business world has been through several crises over the past 100-150 years, are now considered to be familiar, not unpredictable, but a manageable risk. – That’s right. – That’s right, so you know it’s okay then, because you factor it into your decision and you know that if it

Happens, it will mean that you know what it does, so you can count on it. These sudden outbreaks of conflict and their consequences always come as a shock to the business world, and as a result the system always freezes a little, and business decision-makers wonder how long it

Will last, what the solution might be, and what opportunities will be created, because let’s face it, each crisis brings with it an opportunity, as pricing is expected to change on the market if demand falls and supply rises, if supply increases, then there can be a price bargain,

If there can be a price bargain, then I can buy at better entry points, yields increase, and as a result I can realize a higher profit if I enter from a good entry point, as opposed to, say, when in 2019 in a very good, very liquid, very predictable, very clear market environment,

I bought relatively expensive, but there was always enough reserve in the real estate investment that I could sell even more expensive with less profit, but it was visible. It’s a changed world, now obviously there are better entry points to invest in real estate

Because there is more risk and therefore more profit to be made, that’s the point that investors are looking for. Which risk do you see as the first to be removed from this system? I ask because, let’s say, the Palestinian conflict in Israel has been here since 1948.

– Well, it’s the armed confrontation that has the effect here. It’s not so much in business, but perhaps it could be said that the sentiment of world security is how safe we feel in the world when we see that we can spread a local conflict into a global threat by mentioning

Iran’s role, and nobody likes to think about that, but you know it’s a bit uncomfortable. So the risks are almost the same for business as they are for the average person, how big supply chains are affected, how policy reacts to that, whether there will be boycotts, whether there will be any kind of

Sanctions policy that will put certain business areas in a position where certain business sectors will be the losers from that sanctions policy. So it’s really these indirect effects that are difficult to predict. I don’t even want to name any of these points.

A year ago it was energy that was the current problem, and today nobody talks about the impact of the energy crisis. In one year we have adapted, adapted energy systems or made renovations, efficiency investments and reduced our vulnerability. – It’s a good way of adapting. – Yes.

– This was also successful. – What is the explanation for the brutal decline in Poland? – I ask because last year we were talking about how much bigger this market is than ours. Is ours related to size?

– On the one hand the size, and on the other hand they were going at a very high speed. So the expansion of the market has been much greater than in other countries in Central and Eastern Europe, or you could even say compared to Western Europe, it’s been much greater,

There’s been much more projects, much more real estate investment products, and their biggest investor base is the German institutional investor base, German pension funds, German health funds, German small investors, German real estate funds, and the well-known slowdown in the

German economy, and the backlog of these transactions, and there is also a kind of investment financing problem, which is linked to the COVID, which is linked to the post-COVID stimulus, preferential loans, which are now about to expire, is causing a kind of financing

Transition crisis, and as a result there is a drop in demand for real estate investment products, which has hit Poland as a real estate investment market, particularly working and building on this market. – I mentioned that the investment in battery factories is a very significant import of working capital

Into Hungary, and this will continue to be the case in the long term. Or is it the same as a kind of exposure? – I think that the working capital inflows and the staggeringly high scale of what we are experiencing in Hungary today.

So the fact that the working capital inflow into the country this year could be double last year’s €6.2 billion is huge. As a result, more and more companies are moving into Hungary, settling in Hungary, more and more jobs are being created, and this creates a huge opportunity for real estate developers to create

Real estate investments, because these companies need production halls, they need logistics halls, they need office buildings, they need accommodation, they need housing, they need retail premises, they need hotels, so all these real estate needs will hopefully increase as a result of these working capital investments.

– It’s like a permanent magnet. – You will come to say. – And then you drag everything you need to run it with you? – That’s right, if I just say that you can look at the very old example in Győr of Audi setting up

Production, or I would say even earlier, so in the early nineties, Opel started in Szentgotthárd. What grew out of all this and what were the consequences and multiplier effects of such industrial relocation programmes and situations. – This is how the highest rental prices were just now.

– That’s why it’s a classic saying of property developers that the most expensive property is where the highest salaries are, so I could say New York or central London, so obviously where people can earn the most money, obviously that’s where they can spend the most money.

– Is the domestic industry able to meet the demand for factory investment? I ask because there was a period when the workforce disappeared, for example. – There are still labour shortages, but I think that the domestic construction industry has proved over the last five years that it can significantly increase its capacity

If there is demand for it, if orders increase at this rate. Of course, this has its adverse effects, both in terms of the price of building materials and the increase in construction costs, but it’s traceable, so I don’t think it will in any way

Limit this kind of expansion, I think these facilities will be built. – How they can flexibly manage rising wage demands. So you’re promising a worker who has gone to Austria and is holding a carpenter’s pliers there to come home and hold them here instead?

There was a time when people were hunted in the square on their way to work in the morning. – Yes, when there was the investment boom, that was indeed, so in 2019, that was really critical, and it did limit the start of projects to some extent.

Since then, however, the volume of investment has changed, the demand for large investments has recovered a little, and construction companies have reduced their capacity accordingly and are trying to adapt. We real estate developers see that when we put out a contractor tender, a contractor tender for the

Implementation of a certain project, there is more competition, more companies bid, we get competitive bids, we get bargaining bids, we get more bargaining power from the client side, from the private investor side, which is very important for us, and construction companies try to meet this expectation through innovation,

Through efficiency improvements, and try to build cheaper. – How did the office market develop? It hit the Covid because everyone went to home offices, there were huge paid for spaces standing empty, with electricity bills topped up.

– Yes, the office market has not collapsed despite this, while there is no doubt that it is the office building owners who have perhaps been most negatively affected. You can say that what we are already seeing is that the output, that is, the construction of new office buildings, has slowed down completely.

This year 160,000 square metres of new office space will be delivered, next year only 140,000 square metres, and based on the figures we are now seeing, the office market output in 2025 will not even reach 100,000, as developers have cut back on new projects, after seeing demand for

Office space start to fall after Covid. And on the one hand, output is falling, and on the other hand, this year, what we’re seeing, and perhaps this can be interpreted as a turnaround, is that there’s been an increase of about 15 percent in

The demand for new office space, so while output is falling, demand has slowly started to increase, and we’re confident that this process will continue and that sooner or later a balance will be restored. One thing is for sure, home office and hybrid working has made everyone more discerning when it

Comes to choosing an office space or office building location. We’re not just talking about workplaces, we’re talking about much more community space, different office uses, different expectations of office tenants. What is certain is that the big companies are not changing or extending their existing space,

So these large companies renting thousands of square metres are not generating new office building projects, but are staying put, perhaps downsizing. However, this is not the case for businesses with 80-150 employees, who remain dynamic players in the office market and are looking for good written space.

So they are more mobile than large companies, but unfortunately they represent a smaller share of the office market. – What do office tenants do when they see their bills in the middle of the crisis, when they see that they can’t finance it in the long term, they move to another one?

What about the old one? These are long-term fixed-term office leases, which cannot be terminated unilaterally, so there is a contractual obligation between the landlord and the tenant. I think that professional office buildings, operators, office building owners can come to an

Agreement with tenants, they are always looking for common solutions, both to reduce costs and to reduce space, so there is a margin for both parties. The question here is whether the tenant can pass on the increased costs of office use to his clients. So what does the tenant do?

If it provides a service, I’m going to take a financial institution, for example, it has solved this by raising the account management fee by a factor of one. But there are service providers, consultancies, or I don’t know, who don’t have the same opportunity to do that.

So here we need to examine how things are developing on a case-by-case basis, and both sides obviously need to find what is still necessary. As office landlords, we always say that the most expensive office space is empty office space because it doesn’t generate rent.

However, there is a rent minimum below which it is simply not worth renting, so some kind of solution has to be found in between. Covid and the energy crisis has decided that from now on you can only do energy-efficient, flexible, resilient offices, or can you still do other kinds?

– I think that COVID and the energy crisis have drawn attention to the fact that developers who design their new office buildings with this in mind and with this in mind, and build them in a way that meets

The expectations of these tenants, because it makes it easier for them to rent, are already looking for office space, and they are setting many, many criteria that only these new buildings can meet. However, we also have to see that in my country there are ABCD office buildings, there are still a lot of

Companies in the BCD category that have perhaps grown to the point where they can move up to a higher level, and when the sub-category starts to move up, there is always an opportunity, an area where someone

Can move into at a very good price, so they can move from a worse environment, a worse working environment, to a better, more economical environment, so there is an office market mobility that can fill those vacant acadagural offices. – If an office becomes vacant, sooner or later it will become a loft, i.e.

Residential property? How to imagine? Well, it can’t stay empty. Yes, this is not a Hungarian phenomenon, given that Hungary is still underdeveloped in terms of office space, but there are some Western European countries, and even Poland, where the office

Market is so large that the building is owned, while the demand in the residential market is so high that the building owner says he will change the function of his building and will not try to rent office space

In a very, very competitive office market, but will rather convert the office buildings into apartments. In Hungary, it is more from the office, which is an example. Given that the situation in the housing market is well known in Hungary today, and at the same time the hotel market is expanding.

– But what can make it grow? More tourists coming? – Clearly, yes, so compared to Covid, so after the 2020 crisis, tourism has found itself. The hotel market in Budapest, of course, is driven by foreign guests.

It can be said that the airport is forecast to fall just short of the record passenger numbers for 2019 this year, but next year it will exceed the 16.5 million passengers per year it produced in 2019. Foreigners are back in Budapest, foreign tourists are here and looking for quality accommodation.

The other hotels, the rural hotels, which were mainly based on domestic tourism, and therefore they were able to survive Covid more easily, because they had domestic guests. – Nice card. – Nice card. – And nice cards and lots more.

Unfortunately, because of the decline in real wages and the decline in purchasing power of the population, they are feeling this kind of recessionary effect that is being felt in these expenditures. So obviously, fewer Hungarian families are choosing domestic hotel holidays or leisure.

They prefer to do it in other ways or spend this money elsewhere. So I think that’s where we have to make a distinction between the rural and the Budapest hotel market. – Still have room for a hotel in Budapest? – There is definitely room.

Here we should not only think of vacant plots, but also, for example, of a hotel built from an old category C office building in Boráros Square, so that in such cases the developer also examines where there is an outdated, outmoded building in a good location, which is obsolete in terms of both

Its layout and its technical and energy efficiency features, which could be turned into a good project by changing its function, and this is why hotels are being built and are still being built, and there are also hotels that are being built by demolishing old residential buildings,

Collapsed residential buildings and building a new hotel on their site. There is still plenty of potential in Budapest’s hotel developments. I say this so boldly because, compared to Vienna, Prague, similar hotel market data, Budapest is very underdeveloped in hotel capacity.

– Our attractiveness is that if we have more hotel capacity, it will automatically increase, so can we bring guests from Vienna and Prague? – It would be nice if more people decided to spend the weekend in Budapest instead of Vienna. – Yes, yes, I see what you mean.

I think that yes, so if there are more good quality, accessible rooms with appropriate services, then yes, we can increase the number of tourists or the number of people involved in tourism, but we also need to develop attractions.

I’m thinking of things like the House of Hungarian Music or the Museum of Ethnography, so cultural developments that will lead to more and more tourists choosing Budapest, because then they can come and see a Renault exhibition or some other attraction, but we need attractions

And sporting events, and of course we need Formula 1. So there are many, many things that you need in addition to the right hotel infrastructure to make someone want to come to Budapest, want to sleep here and want to spend at least one, preferably two or three nights in this city.

Vienna and Prague are ahead of us, but I see us gradually catching up in recent years in terms of traction. Where the logistics construction market is now, when the Covid crisis hit and no one had anywhere to ship anything, everyone said how nice it would be if we had more warehouses,

Because then we’d have, say, a cap for milk. The warehouse sector is still very underdeveloped compared to the retail sector in Hungary, so there is still plenty of potential. Typically, commercial premises in Hungary try to store and finish goods in small warehouses behind the shop.

This is not the case in Western Europe, where deliveries are made almost every day, these premises are supplied from large warehouses, which is a feature of the modern logistics supply chain. Hungary is AU developed in this respect, so we think there is plenty of room for improvement in the logistics market.

At present there are 5 million square metres of such industrial logistics buildings in Hungary, of which three and a half million square metres are in Budapest and the Budapest area, and one and a half million square metres in the countryside, but we sense that obviously with the industrialisation

Of rural cities and of course with the development of the motorway network, this emphasis is gradually shifting to the countryside, and here, thanks to the Schengen borders and the economic links with the European Union, the possibility of such logistics distribution bases and centres is

Also increasingly arising in the countryside, and this is all providing real estate developers with development opportunities. – You have to buy land near a railway or motorway to have a logistics centre there. – The best one would be intermodural, so if it’s both, there are some, but it varies.

Obviously it depends on the goods themselves. So whether the goods arrive by rail or by lorry to the European Union. There are products and goods that are brought into the country in barges or wagons, even on the Danube. – If it is not necessary. – And the barge can move.

– Yes, because it’s cheaper, and this product can tolerate a delivery time that is four to five times longer than a truck delivery, and there are products that arrive almost exclusively by truck, so you have to build the warehouse capacity accordingly. – Underdeveloped means that developers want to develop storage capacity.

So are there plans on the table? – Yes, I think that the reason why the industrial logistics sector is booming in Hungary among the real estate development sectors is because real estate developers have recognised the opportunities described in this and can fill these warehouses.

The vacancy rate is below six per cent in the countryside, and in Budapest it’s just under 10 per cent, which is not a dangerous number, a dangerous indicator, they say that up to 20 per cent there’s no problem with vacancy.

So even though Budapest is expanding at such a rate, and warehouses are being built in the silo logistics and suburban or Budapest-area warehouse bases, is this underutilisation still competitive? – Pulling public investments and then restarting some of them, have you calculated the impact of that?

Public investments are typically infrastructure, cultural, sports and community projects, so they are all buildings and projects that do not affect the business property development sector. At the same time, the construction industry is two-thirds over capacity.

So you can say that we were queuing up for construction services while the state, as the largest client, or the municipalities, as the largest client, took two-thirds of the capacity. This ratio has changed as public investment has fallen, and now private investment and

Private orders have increased again, and as a result we now have easier access to construction services, more competition, more companies bidding. In the past, in 2019, we invited twelve large contractors for an office building and only three

Of them submitted a bid because the other nine already had work booked or contracted for that period. Now, if we invite twelve companies, almost all of them will fill in the tender documents and submit a bid, and other companies will also apply to take part in the tender.

So the situation has changed, and that’s what we see first of all from this decision to reduce investment. – If it starts up again, then obviously we will have to compete for contractors again, but we will have to wait a little bit, because next year’s GDP, the growth, is expected to be between

Two and four, which is a two-fold difference, which seems quite uncertain. Where are you waiting? – It is the arrival of EU funds alone that can make such a difference of this magnitude, because it may or may not come.

– Or it’s not coming, yes, and that’s why we say 2-400 thousand, not our experts, because they say that if I say there will be no EU funding, it will be two, if there is, it could be four. And that’s because there are so many projects in the pipeline.

It has a building permit, it has construction plans, it can be started almost immediately, so that the national economy would almost immediately feel that if these resources were to arrive and be used, then obviously the situation would change.We always say, and we agree with the economic

Government on this, that it would be good to keep the construction market in balance with a counter-cyclical investment policy, so as to avoid a situation where they have to build 10 million square metres in one year, and 2 million square metres in the next year, but instead the state

Should take a step back when the market is already functioning because of private investment, and build the museum a year or two later, and then, when the private contracting market cannot provide enough work for construction companies, the state should step in, there should be an energy efficiency

Programme, and public facilities should be built so that the capacity of construction companies can be maintained and gently increased. I’ll give you an interesting example, we haven’t talked much about the housing market, but our experts say that if we build and sell 10,000 new homes a year, that will increase GDP

By 0.9 per cent, or almost 1 per cent. So there is a multiplier effect, typically from private investment, that a public or municipal investment cannot have on the national economy to the same extent. – Is it necessary to smooth out the demand in order to keep this multiplier effect operational? – Yes.

– And the state will understand this when it has to make a museum, and the money, once it has been given, has to be spent. – I think you understand. Can you see from the reticence with which you have been approaching large

Investments recently that it is not because of a lack of money? – No, no, purely because of a shortage of money, they looked very seriously at the reasons for the increase, why a project cost more than it was planned to cost, what the reasons were,

Why the building materials cost more, why the labour cost more. They were constantly monitored and examined, and the law on public investment was adopted, which sets a very strict framework for the implementation of a public investment, both in terms of

Planning, preparation and execution, precisely in order to have a much tighter cost and volume management. So we see the positive trends, we think that in hindsight, perhaps the market was not yet mature enough, neither the economic government nor the private investors, to take joint steps to create this

Harmony or balance, but we have done that this year, it is a big step forward, a big achievement, and we are confident that investment decisions will be made accordingly in the future. – How is the housing market developing? – The privately financed housing

Market, because there is not much of a publicly financed housing market. – The saddest situation in the housing market is the virtual disappearance of buyers from the new housing market. Currently, there are 6600 unsold new apartments under construction in Budapest, of which 200 apartments are sold by developers every quarter, 200-300 apartments.

This used to mean 2,500 new home sales every quarter, decimating the market. In absolute practical terms, you can say that the new housing market has shrunk from 75% to 25%, and that’s where it has found equilibrium. So what used to be 10,000 new homes a year will now be maybe 2,000, 2,500 homes.

And here again I’m just referring back to the impact of GDP, so that this is obviously missing from GDP alone. This is the multiplier effect, so the new housing market is in big trouble. Nevertheless, because the market structure is healthy, there is no crisis,

House prices are not falling, but transactions are falling, so the previous annual number of 150,000 transactions in the housing market is now down to 100,000. Around 90% of this is second-hand housing, by the way, but it shows that the 50% drop in volume is still a significant number.

– Sellers are waiting, or buyers are waiting. And if so, which one for what? I would also say, as I said at the beginning of our discussion about real estate investments, that confidence in the future has wavered, and this is shown, for example, in the new housing

Market, that it is not only new home buyers, new home purchases, that have been postponed, but also, for example, those who would otherwise be eligible for a baby loan are not taking out one, even though there is no doubt that they could do so on very favourable terms, so it seems that

People are not taking out a baby loan without a housing goal, and are waiting for it, the risks they are facing now, whether it is war, energy or other jobs, how secure someone’s job is now, their own existence, where it will be in two years’ time, five years’ time, what the future

Holds, what they will have to make provisions for, because if you are on the street, you still have to make a living, so these are the risks arising from your individual circumstances, and for the time being, young people or those who are entitled to them think they can wait

To buy, and these buyers are missing from the market. – If you’re out to buy, then prices fall on the second-hand market, or you’re holding on to it because you’re not necessarily living in it. Or if we have endured so far, we can endure a little now.

– The pricing of the second-hand market is something that professional property developers have little control over, where individual decisions are made. Somebody who lived in a flat for 25 years, which he bought for, I don’t know, three and a half

Million forints, and now somebody comes and says, “You could have sold it for 80 million for 19, but now I’ll give you 65, you might sell it. – Now you leave them in cash.

– Yes, so these are all decisions, but there is no doubt that the gap between the prices available in the second-hand housing market and the prices available in the new housing market has opened, so the price fall in the second-hand housing market is much more significant than in the new housing market.

In the new housing market, the price cannot fall below a certain number because the cost of producing new housing limits the developers’ room for manoeuvre, so there is a breaking point below which new housing developers will not sell.

The used housing market has more elasticity, and this is a healthy process by the way, because in the housing market, which recovered due to the VAT reduction, the price of new housing pulled the price of used housing down with it, and there was almost no difference between a used housing in

A certain location in good condition and a new housing, while the cost of production was comparable. – And the technical content. – And the technical content. – That’s right. And now it looks like perhaps the only good effect of this current situation is that second-hand housing

Is being priced a little lower, making the value and price of new housing more meaningful to home buyers. – How do real estate developers anticipate when, say, the family home benefit scheme changes? I remember when the first version was announced, we were looking at the real estate sites, and some people

Raised it by five million forints because they saw that there was money in the market and they wanted to get a share of it. For a second-hand dwelling. There is no daily price for new apartments. I don’t think that, at least as far as the members of the Kelkaszel Association of Real Estate

Developers are concerned, there are all the major housing developers in Hungary who have been developing apartments for 20 years and have sold thousands of apartments, and they don’t look at government announcements with this kind of daily pricing and price, and then raise the price.

Every project has a payback plan, a budget, and is priced within that. Obviously there’s a pre-sale period, then there’s a main sale, then obviously at the very end the remaining homes are priced differently, but it doesn’t change.

The fact that buyers will have better access to finance, either through state subsidies or loans or low-interest loans, obviously increases the demand for the housing product, and it means that there are already two or three applicants for the same apartment, and then something has to

Be done to decide who should own it, and this is decided everywhere along the lines of pricing. So it’s not the developer that generates it, it’s the market, it’s the market condition. So those government measures which, by the way, very rightly and very successfully supported and served the

Creation of family homes, stimulated demand, and the stimulated demand, because it was not met with sufficient supply at the time, because 20-25 thousand homes had not yet been built, had a price-increasing effect. We agree that housing is a national issue, and we agree that the renewal of the Hungarian housing stock is

Also a national issue, and that at least 40,000 new homes should be built to renew the 4 million homes in Hungary over 100 years. The biggest waste of energy today is in homes, in apartments

– you can buy an electric car, or I don’t know how else to install solar panels, but until we get the energy efficiency of the four million Hungarian homes right, the shortest and quickest way to

Achieve better energy use is to do it, and the easiest way to do this is with new housing, because new housing is almost zero, almost zero emission buildings with enormous energy efficiency, modern, modern technology, low energy bills, very cheap to run, which is not the same for the occupants.

So we think that home creation should continue to be supported, and CSOK+ is a very good way to do that, which I think will bring in a new group of new home buyers. We want energy efficiency to be a consideration here too.

– But this is not a legal aspect, so you can’t make buildings, or at least new buildings, that don’t meet a certain standard. – Yes, but the question is: what do I give state subsidies and subsidised loans for, if I give them for a

Second-hand home, which has a different energy efficiency rating than a new home, or do I just say that you can use the subsidy for the new home, because it’s in the state or national interest that once you’ve got the subsidy, you move into a home like this.

So we continue to say that this should be a consideration for everyone, and that it can further stimulate the market. So the CSOK plus is a good direction, it brings in new customers, it affects a few thousand families,

But it is also important, it is also a good direction, and we also say that the voluntary APR or interest rate ceiling, as it is colloquially known, set by the banks, this 8.5 percent, we think that this is still above the psychological limit.

We think that people would think about an interest rate of around 6% per annum, and they would certainly take out a long-term mortgage at an annual interest rate below 5%, so we continue to say that we need an

Interest rate subsidised loan that keeps the interest rate below 5% for the long term, because then these deferred new home-buying decisions would be back on the agenda, and that would bring thousands of new home buyers into the market, and because of the multiplier effects, this would be reflected not

Only in GDP, but also in transactions in the second-hand housing market, because there, someone who moves from old to new, there’s an old one that’s being released, that’s coming out on the market, that’s someone buying, as a young person or young worker entering the housing market, and then the process starts all over

Again, renovates, invests in energy efficiency, then sells again, then moves to a new home, so that is the healthy cycle of the market, then it could start again. – There is a political debate about whether Hungary should think in terms of owner-occupied housing or rented housing.

Let Hungary think about it for the property developer, whatever their opinion. Well, you have to build this and you have to build that. If you don’t have enough of either. We have opinions, we regret that this is a political debate.

We believe that there is no place for politics in this, that it is an individual decision as to where one wants to live, and that everyone has the right to decide whether the money that they would otherwise invest in

Owning a property should be used for other purposes, for other lifestyles, for a different lifestyle, a more mobile lifestyle, and to solve their housing needs by renting a property for a long period of time. This is typical in developed societies, where people don’t tie up hundreds of millions of dollars and

Don’t commit that much money to financial institutions, but instead do so in the direction of long-term, predictable, permanent rental housing. We think that both options should be maintained, and that politics should stay out of it, not politics deciding which policy to cut with preferences.

– Yes, but it is politics that can write the civil code. – Yes, that’s why I say that it would be good if we left it to the people and said that there could be apartment blocks. At the moment, the regulations are not very favourable to the

Construction of apartment buildings, and no apartment buildings are being built. The law on the rental of dwellings and premises is the same if I rent a warehouse, if I rent a shop, if I rent office space or if I rent a dwelling, while these four functions represent a completely different type

Of use, so it should not be regulated like the rental of a warehouse, from the regulatory point of view, the VAT treatment of renting for business purposes is different. So if a developer were to think – and of course we have calculated this as a real estate developer, and the real estate developers’

Roundtable has a strategy and concept for the development of apartment buildings, which we have also submitted to the economic government or the government’s competent authorities – then we would be at a disadvantage, because building and renting a sixty-apartment apartment building is

Not currently a profitable investment, while apartment buildings as an investment product are missing from the real estate investment market. It used to be a basic investment product, for the railways, everyone had a tenement. – That’s right, and that’s the way Budapest was built, so the apartment blocks in the city

Centre, with the halls, the concierge flats, etc. etc. It was at the time when our capital was created, at the time when it gave an impetus to urbanisation and created housing for the bourgeoisie. When do you expect the bounce? Twenty-five or twenty-four.

Rather 25, we think that the first half of next year will still be difficult for the housing market, and then with inflation falling and the interest rate environment improving, we think that the second half of 2024 could be an upward trend, and in 25 we are confident that purchasing power will recover

And those problems will disappear, that in 25 there will be a buoyant demand on the market, which the real estate development and housing development community is preparing to serve, and we are ready to increase this capacity and ensure the balance of the housing market.

– Thank you for the information! In the last hour Ernő Takács, President of the Real Estate Developers Round Table Association was the guest of Inforádió Arena. The conversation has just been recorded on the radio. Editor-in-chief Márton Módos participated in the preparation of the programme.

If you found it interesting, please subscribe to the Inforadio Youtube channel and you will automatically receive the next conversation. Thank you for your attention, I am Tibor Exterde.