St. Petersburg, 27 January 2023. Some 144,000 square meters of office spaces was left vacant in St. Petersburg in 2022 after some international companies had decided to leave Russia or scale down their presence. By January 2023, some 74,000 square meters of this amount (51%) was available for potential tenants, whereas some 47,000 square meters (33%) were never offered for rent on the open market as these spaces had been immediately taken over by new tenants. Some 23,000 square meters of offices were still tied up by January as their lease agreements with previous tenants have not been terminated so far.  

A third (47,000 square meters) of the office spaces vacated by international companies in St. Petersburg falls into the Class A category. Nearly 11,000 square meters (23%) in this segment has already been leased out.

Offices in St. Petersburg were vacated predominantly by IT companies, including Veeam Software, EPAM Systems, Microsoft, Dino systems, Deutsche Telekom, JetBrains, Luxoft and Grid Dynamics, among others.

Overall, vacancy rate for offices in St. Petersburg reached 10.5% by year-end, which compares to just 5.6% in 2021.

Even as international companies were leaving, St. Petersburg’s market saw a record demand for office property in 2022 with a total of over 250,000 square meters of office property was leased out/sold. The high demand was largely due to Gazprom entities (42% of total amount leased) as well as to the IT&T segment (30%). In particular, Chinese telecom giant Huawei last year bought Kantemirovskir Business Centre (ca. 50,000 sq. m) for its own use.