Page 55 - UKRRptFeb20

9.1.4 ​Construction & Real estate sector news
Ukraine plans to have the biggest road building year in its history this year. ​Roads have been a political issue for several years and the president has mentioned then often. Repairing the roads is a piece of low hanging political fruit that Zelenskiy can pick to improve his ratings. Poor roads contribute to the more than 400 road accidents that take place in Ukraine every day, PM Honcharuk said in January. He promised: “In the next 5 years, roads will become a symbol of growth and development of Ukraine.” To improve safety, Infrastructure Minister Vladislav Krikliy says 250 speed cameras and weight in motion devices will be installed across Ukraine. The building programstarts March 1. Officials have five weeks to complete tenders and plans, Prime Minister Honcharuk said at the state highway agency’s Ukravtodor UA Roads 2020 forum. The plan is to spend $2.7bn to repair and rebuild 4,000 km of roads.
The highway agency plans to build nine ring roads, allowing trucks and through traffic to bypass city centres​. Bypasses will be built around the cities of: Beregove, Chernivtsi, Dnipro, Khmelnitsky, Lviv, Poltava, Rivne, Zhytomyr, and Ternopil. “Ukrainian cities should be freed from transit traffic, because it reduces the number of jams and improves the transit potential of the road network,” Kubrakov said. “It will positively influence traffic safety, air quality, the life of the road surface and reduce the number of accidents.”
To finance rebuilding of an additional 1,000 km of roads, Ukravtodor is talking with the Finance Ministry about placing a Eurobond next summer, Alexander Kubrakov, the new head of the agency, tells the centre for Transportation Strategies. This new funding would allow Ukravtodor to pave twice as much road length as last year’s 2,350 km. Kubrakov, a veteran of the EU-funded Better Regulation Delivery Office, says he is cutting corruption by replacing 70% of the heads of regional highway agencies and embracing electronic tenders and foreign oversight.
Through September, Ukrainians have commissioned 7.7mn square meters of new buildings– 48% more than during the first three quarters of last year. ​According to the State Statistics Service, the leading regions are Kyiv -1.2mn square meters, up 24%; Lviv - 1mn square meters, up 62%; Odesa - 674,000 square meters, up 58%. Kyiv city saw 934,500 new square meters, up 52%.
The Rada passes legislation in December aimed at boosting transparency in the real estate industry​ and eliminating corruption schemes. Starting in January, the government will introduce a new system for real estate appraisal which gives notaries the right to access a centralized database to verify property ownership.
Ukraine’s big five cities have this retail construction picture: ​Kyiv – 44 projects with a total leasable area of 1.5mn square meters; Odesa – 15 projects with an area of 420,000 square meters; Kharkiv –124,000 square meters; Dnipro – 100,000 square meters; and Lviv – 80,000 square meters.
Ukraine’s shopping mall boom is moving the sector towards “saturation,”​ Konstantin Oleinik, head of strategic consulting at UTG, warns in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine. He predicts: “A surplus of retail space may
55​ UKRAINE Country Report​ February 2020 ​ ​www.intellinews.com