UrBC, Yekaterinburg, September 27, 2012. The share of office space available for rent in Yekaterinburg might drop back to the pre-recession figures by 2014, Director-General of OOO Ural-Hermes Alexander Zasukhin told UrBC.

The amount of good quality office space in Yekaterinburg has more than tripled since 2007. According to the city council’s forecasts, the total area of office realty is to rise to 1.65m sq m by 2020, while the number of up-to-date business centers will come to 91.

‘This has to do with the fact that the buildings being commissioned at the moment are primarily the ones that were started as early as before 2008, and virtually no new projects were launched during the recession years. Given that an office building normally takes three to five years to put up, it would be only logical to presume that the amount of new office space will drop in 2013 and 2014. A number of independent experts feel that this situation might even lead to some office space shortage over the given period. However, for this shortage to become a reality, some new tenant companies must appear to rent offices, and the existing office space should also expand – and this is only possible if the Russian economy gathers a fast development pace,’ Zasukhin says.

At the moment, most office space available for rent in Yekaterinburg pertains to Class B. According to the data provided by Ural-Hermes, over 20% of offices are currently vacant in this segment. As for Class A, the figure comes to 10%, which is mainly due to the factors that were at play in 2011, when 8 new business centers with the total area of 280,000 sq m were commissioned in the city.