Rainy weather delayed the construction of Nová Karolina

Ostrava - The rainy weather in recent days has slightly slowed down the construction work on the first phase of Ostrava’s New Karolina, which is one of the largest urban development projects. Builders are about ten days behind schedule. If the weather is good, work on the construction site will now proceed non-stop, said Luboš Kočí, the director of Multi Development, which won the competition for the redevelopment of the former industrial complex. The project, worth approximately 15 billion crowns, is expected to be completed in 2018.
    According to Kočí, the current delay in the overall construction schedule is not dramatic. Currently, the focus is primarily on building a commercial and entertainment center with an area of about 57,000 square meters. This is the most demanding construction of the first phase, which is expected to be completed in 2012.
    According to the original plans, the first part of the construction was supposed to open around this time, but everything was delayed by the economic crisis, and work on the construction site only resumed this February after about a year hiatus. Multi Development managed to secure a loan exceeding 2.5 billion crowns from four banks.
    In the first phase, New Karolina will also feature administrative spaces covering more than 20,000 square meters and a residential building with 200 apartments. Multi Development is collaborating with another development company, Passerinvest Group, on the construction of the administrative section. According to Kočí, negotiations are currently ongoing with several significant interested parties regarding administrative spaces.
    "We have sufficient finances to build what we are constructing. The only thing that still needs to be resolved is the financing of the administrative building, where without securing a sufficient number of future leases, it is practically impossible to finance the office market today," Kočí stated.
    Multi has now agreed on similar cooperation for the residential building, which it will build in partnership with GEMO OLOMOUC, which is already securing construction work at New Karolina.
    While currently several hundred people are working at the construction site, the largest activity is expected next year, when it should involve 2,500 to 3,000 people.
    So far, about 400 million crowns have been invested in the construction, but the volume of construction work will increase, and approximately 100 million crowns should be invested monthly, currently it is about half of that. This year, it is expected to be around a billion crown investment.
    The last buildings of the former industrial complex Karolina were demolished about 20 years ago, and the site had to be decontaminated for ten years. The remediation cost nearly two billion crowns. This year, the post-remediation monitoring will be completed, which is supposed to show, based on groundwater sampling, whether the remediation was carried out according to the required parameters. According to the preliminary results, there are no issues.
    New Karolina is to be built on an area of 32 hectares, making it more than seven times larger than Prague's Wenceslas Square.