25 Jun Mitiska REIM and Karuzela Holding open new retail park development in Poland
Mitiska REIM, the leading specialist investor in European convenience real estate, has today announced the opening of a new retail park in Jastrzębie Zdrój, a city of 90,000 inhabitants in southern Poland. Developed in partnership with Karuzela Holding and owned in joint-venture with the FRI 2 fund, this latest opening is the third retail park development opened in Poland by Mitiska REIM and Karuzela Holding in the past nine months.
Conveniently located near the city center and close to both residential and business areas, the new retail park has 16 retail units with a total gross leasable area (GLA) of 11,500m2. The tenant mix comprises new brands for Karuzela which include food-anchor Carrefour, home and garden retailer Jula, Xtreme Fitness and discount retail chain Woolworth. Other tenants include a mix of leading national and international brands such as Sinsay, Martes Sport, RTV Euro AGD, Dealz, Pepco and Rossmann. The new retail park has been designed to achieve a “Very Good” score on the BREEAM scale.
Grzegorz Pekalski, Member of the Board of Karuzela Holding, comments: “This latest retail park development is a good example of our de-risked development approach. We first acquired the site in an off-market transaction in 2021 and over the past three years have successfully managed the redevelopment process to create a new retail park which has been in high demand from tenants and brings new retail infrastructure to shoppers in both Jastrzębie Zdrój and the surrounding area.”
Radoslaw Misko, Mitiska REIM’s Investment Manager for Poland, said: “Working in partnership with Karuzela Holding, we have created a portfolio of 11 food-anchored retail parks across Poland, with plans to open further sites in the next two years which will increase the total GLA of the portfolio to 160,000m2 of modern, sustainable and conveniently located retail space.”
Sylvie Geuten-Carpentier, Managing Partner at Mitiska REIM, adds: “The opening of this development marks another success for our second fund, FRI 2. We are now in the process of fundraising and deploying capital for our latest fund, MEREP 3, which we believe could become an exceptional vintage given the outstanding buying opportunities we are currently seeing in the market.”
Financing was provided by Bank Pekao, which has also provided financing for Mitiska REIM and Karuzela projects in Wągrowiec, Biała Podlaska and Świebodzin.