The National Real Estate CP Awards 2017, Ukraine’s most prestigious commercial property awards, took place at Kyiv’sPremier Palace Hotel on Oct. 27.
The event gathered leading representatives of Ukraine’s real estate sector. Awards went to the developers of high-class projects such as five-star hotels, recreation complexes, and medium-scale shopping centers. This is the fourth such ceremony organized by Commercial Property magazine.
Altogether there were 15 nominations, including the Best Large-Scale Shopping Center Award, the Best Residential Complex Premium Class Award, the Best Architecture Bureau Award, and the Best High-class Business Center Award. To be nominated, the contestants had to fill in an application on Commercial Property’s website, providing details regarding their completed projects. Any real estate that was built during the 2013-2017 period could compete for the awards.
Winner’s call
The winner of Best Architecture Bureau Award was Archimatika, a company established in 2005 that focuses mainly on non-commercial property, such as residential buildings and private schools.
“Our specialization is residential houses,” Olha Neshta, the company’s PR manager said. “For example, in Kyiv we built the Comfort Town residential complex.”
Aside from Kyiv projects, there were also those from other cities such as the Hotel de Paris in Odesa, the Forum shopping center in Lviv, and the Verholy Park recreation complex in Poltava Oblast.
Tatyana Antonyuk, the editor-in-chief of Commercial Property, said that such nationwide and diverse awards are necessary, as the idea is to bring the public’s attention to recently built high-class architectural constructions.
“Such objects are not easy to build,” Antonyuk said. “It takes time, and we wanted to show the differences in what was built in Ukraine over the past three years, and to publically praise them.”
However, most of the awards were given for projects in Kyiv, considering the high demand for new buildings in the capital, Antonyuk said.
Tough vote
Twenty-nine jurists, both Ukrainian and foreign real estate experts, participated in the vote including: Alexander Svistunov, the chief architect of Kyiv; Alexander Lesnykov, the director of the real estate and capital construction department at Forbes and Manhattan Ukraine; Mykola Tolmachov, the founder of TMM, a development and construction company; and Lucia Bondar, owner and publisher of Commercial Property.
Rostislav Levinzon, General Director of Quinn Properties and Chairman of Univermag Ukraina’s managing board, was also one of the jurists. He said that since the last awards ceremony back in 2013, Ukraine’s understanding of architecture has changed.
There were no easy decisions, as the criteria were not only based on how commercially successful the real estate was, but also how well integrated the architecture was with the surrounding infrastructure.
“We paid attention not only to the object but to the environment around it,” says Levinzon. The building had to bring an extra value to the location and fit the general view.
The event was sponsored by Colliers International, Schuko, Data Group, Horizon Office Towers Business Center, and Astarta Business Center.
