Several construction projects in Sofia, pertaining to the building of office complexes with total office space of about 160 000 sq m, have been frozen indefinitely, Anton Slavchev, manager of the offices and business parks department at Colliers real estate consulting company, told Dnevnik daily on October 20 2009.

Complexes exceeding 900 000 sq m of new office space are currently under construction in Sofia but it was revealed that many of them will be slashed. The market for business offices and retail space was one of the most branches in the sector most affected by the global economic downturn, and according to Colliers, since the turn of 2009, rents have decreased by about 20 per cent on the back of seven years' continuous growth.

"There is simply no way that all newly constructed office buildings will find their tenants, but very large projects under construction will be continued regardless," said Tanya Kosseva Boshova, chief executive of the European Trade Centre (ETC) currently under construction on Tsarigradsko Chaussee.