The apartment building "City Gate" in the center of Ostrava is completed

Ostrava - The company Metrostav Development has completed a residential building in the center of Ostrava, previously known as the City Gate. Its name has now been changed to Ostrava Gate. The construction of this architecturally interesting building with 37 apartments and eight commercial spaces began in September 2008, with costs exceeding 195 million crowns. Currently, a quarter of the spaces are occupied, including six apartments. Their sales were frozen last year due to the crisis; however, the revival of demand and sales occurred only in the first quarter of this year. Otto Koval, the company’s sales director, stated this to ČTK.
    The building on Church Square, where the city gate once stood, was designed in the so-called urban style by the Brno studio KUBA & PILAŘ architects. According to their design, the Moravian-Silesian Scientific Library, nicknamed the black cube, should also be built in Ostrava.
    In the Ostrava Gate, there are above-standard apartments ranging from 63 to 118 square meters, with prices between 3.1 and seven million crowns. The sold units are primarily smaller apartments (2+kk). "Currently, we are maintaining a sales plan, according to which we should sell six more apartments this year, so the total occupancy rate would reach 40 percent by the end of the year," Koval specified.
    The company had to adjust the sales plan last year due to the effects of the economic crisis, which affected the real estate market, among others. "The year 2009 was, in one word, misery for us in the Moravian-Silesian region, which is why we postponed the sales plan by a year. However, since the beginning of this year, we have been observing a gradual market revival. Most of the six occupied apartments were sold only this year,” he added.
    Of the eight non-residential units, the developer has already sold five; the Ostrava Gate will host, for example, an architectural studio or a two-story café, likely with a sushi bar. "It is precisely because of this that the demand for apartments is increasing. People probably didn't want to enter a 'dead' building," Koval said, noting that dozens of people came to view the building in recent days.
    As a result of the economic crisis, hundreds of new apartments remain vacant throughout the region. This is also related to the fact that nearly 3,000 apartments were completed in the region last year, which is about a quarter more than the previous year, despite the crisis. Many developers are therefore still waiting to initiate new projects. A true awakening of the apartment market in the region is expected no sooner than in six months.
    Ostrava Gate is the first project of Metrostav Development in the Moravian-Silesian region. The development company was established in 2008 from a division of Metrostav, of which it became a wholly-owned subsidiary. Currently, it employs 30 people, which is 40 percent fewer than before the outbreak of the crisis, which forced it to make layoffs. The company is also building 1,300 apartments in Prague's Žižkov and is preparing to construct mountain apartments in Rokytnice nad Jizerou.