Accolade: investing three-quarters of a billion in northeastern Poland
The Accolade Group invests almost three-quarters of a billion crowns in the construction of the Białystok Industrial Park in northeastern Poland. Located near the border with Byelorussia, Lithuania and the Kaliningrad enclave, the project is split into three separate phases, which, taken together, will offer around 40,500 square metres for lease to tenants in the field of light industry and logistics. An area of 21,600 square metres is already leased. The first tenants include the glass-making giant Pilkington with 10,000 square metres.
“The Białystok Park is already Accolade Group’s sixth investment in Poland,” says Milan Kratina, Accolade Group’s CEO. “It will be the first in its region to offer modern variable space for lease to light industry and logistics. As such, it fits in nicely with our strategy in Poland to build our presence in major regional centres that are similar in size, for example, to Brno. This is a good approach, as we already have agreements with tenants for more than half of the area in Białystok,“ adds Kratina.
“One of the first tenants is Pilkington, a glass-making giant. We have a long-term ten-year lease agreement with them for 10,000 square metres. Pilkington has already been operating elsewhere in Białystok for a number of years; in the Białystok Industrial Park it will have its most state-of-the-art plant where it will make glass panels, metal frames and tempered glass. Production is scheduled to start in September,” says Lukáš Répal, Accolade Group’s Asset Management and Acquisition Director.
The construction of the industrial park will take place in three phases (22,321; 14,481; and 3,818 square metres, respectively). The first tenants will start moving into the premises in summer this year; the entire Park is set to be completed by the end of the third quarter this year.
Białystok is the largest and quickest-growing city of the Podlaskie Voivodeship in north-eastern Poland. Situated some fifty kilometres from the Byelorussian border (which is also the border of the European Union / Schengen area), Białystok is an important trading hub. The city alone has 300,000 inhabitants and the Białystok metropolitan area has a total population of around half a million.
The city has fifteen schools providing higher education, including the largest technical university in north-eastern Poland. The traditional local industries include electrical and mechanical engineering or the food-processing industry.
The Białystok Industrial Park is situated inside the city borders, and it takes 15 minutes to get there from the centre by car or 25 minutes by public transport. There are several bus stops directly at the park. The industrial zone is connected to the city ring road and is located about a kilometre from European road E67, which starts in Prague and ends in Helsinki, with Białystok located about half way between these two cities. The drive to the eastern border of the Schengen area takes some 45 minutes, to Warsaw two hours, to Minsk and Vilnius about four hours; who would like to go by car from Białystok to Prague would spend about eight hours driving.