NCH investment fund launches online portal dedicated to commercial spaces

New Century Holdings (NCH) is expanding the Imobiliare.ro real estate platform by launching a site dedicated to commercial spaces in Romania – office, retail, logistics, industrial, plots of land and investment opportunities.

The platform – Spatiicomerciale.ro – targets small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and entrepreneurs, a niche where Siminel Andrei, NCH’s representative in Romania, says that unlike on the corporate segment there is a lot of potential for growth. There is demand for such spaces and a matching supply but lack of an organized environment makes access to information very difficult.

Andrei says he got the idea for the site when he failed to launch a chain of shops around five years ago after being unable to find the spaces required because he simply couldn’t get in touch with the owners.

The plan for Spatiicomerciale.ro is to recover the initial EUR 100,000 investment in the first year of activity but owners hope that by 2015 cumulated revenues coming from the ads placed on the site by owners and real estate agencies should reach EUR 1 million.

For now the site presents only properties currently available for rent or sale but as the market matures, Andrei hopes to launch more complex services which will allow forward transactions.

At present about 9,500 owner ads from Bucharest and 437 other localities are on the site but this should grow to 30,000 ads by the end of 2015.

Imobiliare.ro was launched in 2000 and is currently the leader of the Romanian online residential classifieds market. Last year the site generated EUR 1.2 million, up 30 percent y-o-y.

NCH is the platform’s main shareholder and has invested about EUR 1.5 million in the project over the past 5 years. In Romania NCH owns approximately 1,000 commercial spaces through Romarta and Metex, two local companies.

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