Intro
We began the day with an early flight from London to Warsaw. We then had lunch with Tomasz Klodowski and Niki Klodowska (SM ‘18), where we hoped to
receive a basic understanding of Poland’s market and add to the information we obtained last summer before going into any official meetings with other companies. Next, we went to the newly built Warsaw Spire, where we went to the Polish HQ of Jones Lang LaSalle. JLL is an “all in one” real estate business, working on a much larger scale than Cabot and it has a particularly strong presence in Poland. Regional director Tomasz Puch walked us through a detailed report on the Polish market and the future direction of industrial real estate in Poland.
Tomasz Klodowski
Tomasz Klodowski is the managing director of Stewart Title Insurance’s European Operations. He has been a part of Stewart Title for over 15 years and over this time has held positions with more responsibilities. He talked to us about the climate of the Warsaw market and pointed out the great number of construction projects going on. He informed us that many of the buildings in production are apartment complexes, and only one or two of them are retail and office buildings. Mr. Klodowski also told us how the city is split up into different sectors where in certain areas there are mainly residential properties and in others, there are mainly newer office spaces.
Jones Lang LaSalle
At JLL we met with Tomasz Puch, the regional director, and we discussed the Warsaw market and how much the Poland market as a whole has expanded in
the past decade. He gave us a presentation that was very statistic intensive. The data compared the performance of all the major industrial real estate firms that either sell or develop warehouses in Poland. Stats all showed a sudden increase in the amount of square footage being created. Cabot worries that they arrived in Poland too late and that there is no longer a sufficient amount of land to develop. Environmentally conscious laws, such as the law stating that agricultural land can only be sold to another farmer or the church, make acquiring land increasingly difficult as many other companies have occupied so much land already. Consequently, the price of land is skyrocketing, forcing Cabot to either boost rents or take a lower return on their investment.
Summary
Our prior research was entirely centered on the Polish industrial market, and so it was good to see other firms reaching the same conclusions as we did last summer. It made us proud to know that our research was on target and that we had done accurate work. Our lunch meeting with Mr. Klodowski was a good refresher for us as we recalled all that we had learned last summer in our work with Cabot. It helped us reorient ourselves to the Polish market before meeting with JLL. The presentation at JLL was an extremely in-depth analysis of trends in Poland, so it was a fantastic supplement to the general knowledge we had about the market. Mr. Puch was extremely knowledgeable about all of the nuances of the industrial real estate market, so he was a great resource for us to expand our own understanding.