C&W picks Budapest for Portfolio Services Center

"The Portfolio Services Center is a multi-disciplined, centralized team of real estate professionals that partner with on-site and in-market teams to deliver fully integrated services to Cushman & Wakefield’s most innovative and progressive clients," reads a statement on C&Wʼs website.

Cushman & Wakefield has brought billions of forints to Hungary since 1991, building office, industrial and commercial property, said Tamás Polster, head of the companyʼs Global Occupier Services (GOS) Strategic Consulting unit.

Traditionally, C&W has dealt mainly with investment consulting and real estate brokering in Central and Eastern Europe, but now more than half of its revenues derive from tenants, and Budapest will become the European center for this dynamically growing business division, Polster said. C&W staff will help foreign clients decide where to invest, and where to establish R&D centers or new factories, while conducting these transactions and managing the contracts and properties from Budapest, he added.

So far, 82 staff have been hired for the center, three-quarters of them Hungarians.

Szijjártó was cited by state news wire MTI as saying that this is the eighth investment by a major American company in Hungary this year through the governmentʼs investment promotion program, totaling USD 30 million in value and creating a total of 1,100 new jobs. He added that the U.S. is now the second biggest source of investment after Germany, with over 1,700 American firms employing more than 100,000 people in Hungary, making the U.S. the countryʼs most important trading partner outside the EU. Bilateral trade between the two countries exceeded USD 3 billion in the first seven months of 2017, he added.