When creating its budget for 2023, Inowai anticipated it would be a tough year. “We felt the slowdown from May 2022 on in our figures, and into 2023,” CEO told Delano during a recent interview. But, now that interest rates seem to be at peak levels, he is cautiously optimistic about the year ahead--or at least concerning the second half of 2024.
Commercial
When it comes to commercial real estate activity, Baertz believes the outlook will improve, but it will take a few quarters. “Institutional investors see that interest rates are at a peak now and they’re getting interested again in the market,” he explained. “What we’re seeing are more discussions happening between sellers and potential buyers, and I believe that we might see transactions happening again around Q2, Q3 next year.”
Areas in Luxembourg City are still attractive, while Belval is also doing well. Other areas are “a bit more complicated,” Baertz stated. “We see that tenants really want to be well connected, so they’re going where the tram will be, or where it is already.”
Inowai is also in discussions with companies about satellite offices, but Baertz said those locations aren’t large surface areas. The interest would be to give employees options to visit the offices, not that they’d necessarily be leaving city locations to work from there fully.
Residential
There was a earlier this year, primarily driven by , and the new government coalition agreement includes a number of key linked to housing. Baertz hopes the prices will “come down even further, in order to be interesting to investors.”
Beyond government measures, however, Baertz said, “the market needs to readapt and put the projects back on the market and be ready to sell. That will also take approximately six months before we’ll see something in the figures.”
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He refers to three poles: Luxembourg City and environs, the northern “Nordstad” region and the broader southwest, including Esch/Alzette. In Luxembourg City, space is limited in the most expensive areas--neighbourhoods like Limpertsberg and Belair, for example--but Baertz said there are still opportunities in key areas, e.g., Cloche d’Or (adding the caveat that construction and pricing are still issues nevertheless). Meanwhile, “newcomers are still coming to the station area [Gare district] or Bonnevoie before heading somewhere else.”
While pre-pandemic, the north was favoured by large families needing more space, and some following the pandemic, Baertz said “somehow it never got the push they needed,” despite government support in developing the region. The southwest region and east both have development opportunities, although historically more development has happened in the southwest: “If you go to Esch now at 3pm, you get into [traffic] with the car.”
Construction
Inowai can also be a bit optimistic since “there’s so much backlog that we need to deliver, and there have been nearly no new constructions started, and we still have all these people wanting to come to Luxembourg,” Baertz said.
Luxembourg is indeed expected to surpass by 2050, yet this year were soaring. Statec, in its 29 November , stated that morale in the sector was showing “clear deterioration”, as Luxembourg was one of four eurozone countries (alongside Italy, Lithuania and Estonia) to witness a year-on-year sector employment drop in Q2 2023. “At the same time, the number of job seekers from construction registered with Adem is increasing sharply (+45% year-on-year in October 2023), while the stock of job offers is decreasing, reflecting a lower demand for workforce,” the statistics bureau stated, referring to the Adem jobs agency.
Global supply disruptions as a result of the pandemic, plus the war in Ukraine (Russia being a main source of timber, for example), caused material shortages and put on the construction sector.
Baertz said that he hears “delays are still quite long” even if “prices on various materials, not on all, have come down. They’re in a more stable phase of the prices again, so you can at least plan ahead with prices, and people give you fixed prices again. That’s positive.”
“Before the crisis, you would say in 24 months you’d finish your apartment block. Today we always count 27 to 30 months… to be on the safe side.”