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roads under the management the State Agency of Motor Roads (Ukravtodor), along with 123,000 km of regional roads managed by regional administrations, and over 250,000 km of urban roads administered and managed by municipalities.
Initially, they set themselves the goal of completing capital repairs on the main street in every rural village. Quality and speed were the two primary demands of companies hired to do the work. From 2015-2019, the state administration spent about USD 185 million to resurface 500 km of roads in the Dnipropetrovsk region. This experience has since been applied to the Big Construction program.
Infrastructure Minister Kubrakov says criticisms of Big Construction often lack an understanding of how the road construction business works. “No one is in the business of building roads for free, even if only a 1% profit margin is included in the bid. That is why Ukravtodor has been pushing to adopt the Engineering, Procurement, Construction and Financing (EPCF) contractual framework for large road construction projects,” he says.
Others vouch for the positive economic impact of Ukraine's infrastructure upgrade. Grigory Kukuruza of Kyiv-based macroeconomic forecasting company Ukraine Economic Outlook says Big Construction will likely account for between 35-50% of the country's net GDP growth in 2021. "Total expenditures on Big Construction amount to about UAH 138.5 billion, or USD 5 billion, this year," he notes.
9.1.4 Construction & Real estate sector news
The growth of the Construction industry in Ukraine slowed down. According to the State Statistics Service, the volume of construction output in January–July was valued at ₴76.8 bln ($2.88 bln), compared with the same period of the previous year. Illustrating a slowdown in construction, as the industry grew by only 0.2% in the first half of the year. Residential construction output increased by 19.9%, commercial construction and infrastructure construction output dropped by 3.9% and 4.3% respectively.
Dragon Capital has bought Viking, a new Class A business center in Lviv, the company reports. “This is our second business center in Lviv and the 14th in the Dragon Capital portfolio of office real estate in Ukraine,” says Tomas Fiala, CEO of Dragon. Located at the intersection of Zelena and Pimonenko Streets in Lviv’s Sykhiv, the business center was commissioned last month. Composed of two buildings the center has a total area of 18,700 square meters. Dragon Capital Property Management now manages 31 commercial real estate properties with a total area of 778,000 sq m.
Occupancy of co-working space rises to 75%. The Ukrainian coworking and flexible office market is returning to pre-quarantine levels. The average
64 UKRAINE Country Report October 2021 www.intellinews.com