IULIUS company will allocate a quarter of 6,000 square meters of retail premises in the Palas Campus Iași-based project to local entrepreneurs, writes Ziarul Financiar. The 120 million Euroinvestment for revitalizing the Sf. Andrei downtown area will be the largest office building in Romania (54,000 sqm of class A office premises), but the project is a mixed-use one and also includes a retail component (6,000 sqm), green spaces and urban mobility solutions, including upgrades to the road infrastructure. “The project will include a food market concept with restaurants, coffee shops and terraces, an area for services, including medical services, as well as venues for local producers. Thus, there are opportunities for the latter to be a part of a project set to accommodate more than 5,000 employees, a constant public for their businesses, but that will also draw residents from the nearby area,” says Oana Diaconescu, Head of Leasing Manager at Iulius.
Aside from Palas Campus, IULIUS also has two new projects in the works, namely Family Market, which entail a total investment of 16 million Euro. The emphasis here is also on local initiatives, as the two formats are designed as platforms for promoting local producers. “There is a concern for allotting spaces for local initiatives as early as the tenant mix creation phase, yet this is not a selection criteria or a prospecting target,” added Oana Diaconescu.
In the IULIUS shopping mall network, as well as in the Palas Iași and Iulius Town Timișoara projects, local entrepreneurs come from different domains, ranging from public food service, restaurants and coffee shops, to fashion and services. The local tenants’ ratio within IULIUS projects reported to the occupied area averages at 15.5%, while national tenants represent 18.4%.
“We have partners who started out with just one location in Iulius Mall Iași, opened back in 2000, and who also joined us in our other projects, becoming national networks. We also have partners who grew within the Palas Iași mixed-use project and then leveraged the opening of Iulius Town Timișoara to access the market in the west of Romania. This is the case for Fenice, the Lebanese and Mediterranean restaurant that opened the largest restaurant of this kind in Timișoara last year,” says Oana Diaconescu.
Palas Iași also accommodates an area designed especially for local entrepreneurs. This area includes a variety of tenants ranging from butcher shop concepts (such as Meat Concept Store and Kosarom), Cămara lui Baciu grocery shop, Blanca confectionery, Plăcintele Domnești pastry shop, Prisaca Bârnova bee products, all the way to everyday services.
However, of all the IULIUS portfolio, the Family Market concept will have the strongest local features. The first two projects of this kind are developed in Iași County (in Miroslava Commune, as well as within the city, in the Bucium Neighborhood), and the works are scheduled to start this spring. For the Family Market in Miroslava Commune, part of the metropolitan area of Iași, the investment will add up to 7 million Euro, while the one in the Bucium neighborhood of Iași will entail 9 million Euro. “In terms of consumption behavior, in the IULIUS network we note the consumers’ appetite for purchasing Romanian and even local products, particularly in the food & beverages and services area,” added Oana Diaconescu.