In recent years, the IT sector has been the leading driving force behind the development of the Ukrainian office market, absorbing more than 50% of all office space. It was the takeover of office space by IT companies that provoked an unprecedented increase in activity and resuscitation of almost all mothballed and postponed projects a few years ago. However, already in the 2020-2021 coronavirus years, this segment showed a significant slowdown in the dynamics of development. There was a decrease in the absorption of office space, the transfer of personnel to a remote mode of work, and the military actions that began further strengthened the negative trend.

But, despite this, as predicted by the Ministry of Statistics, by 2024, the number of Ukrainian IT specialists is expected to increase to 450,000 people. Therefore, the opening of new offices is expected against the backdrop of personnel transfers.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine provoked a rapid movement of IT personnel in March-April 2022 from the eastern and southern parts of the country. Thus, about 11,000 specialists left Kharkiv, approximately 10,000 people left Kyiv. Such relocation to safer regions of Western Ukraine and abroad led to the closure of 33 offices of IT companies. But many of them led to relocation. Therefore, such cities as: Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Poltava, Cherkasy, Kropyvnytskyi, Uzhhorod, Ternopil and Chernivtsi received an additional impetus to development, where no less than 27 new representative offices were opened. In addition, the idea of creating a new national-level IT cluster in Transcarpathia under the commonwealth of local authorities and local representatives of the IT sphere appeared.

Later, with the liberation of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, and Kharkiv regions, employees began to return to the big cities. For example, in Kyiv there was an increase from 33% to 43% of the IT staff of Ukraine or up to 116,000 people, in Kharkiv – from 2% to 3.2% (about 8,700 people), in Dnipro – from 6% to 7% (~19,000 people), in Odesa – from 3% to 4% (~11,000 people). All this happened with a proportional outflow of personnel from Lviv, where a decrease from 21% to 19%, or 51,000 people, in Ivano-Frankivsk – from 5% to 4.1% (~11,400 people), in Uzhhorod – from 2.4% to 2.1% (~5,700 people).

In addition to the return of their staff, Ukrainian companies began to actively hire foreigners at the end of 2022. Thus, new offices were additionally opened in Poland (9 new representative offices), and 6 in Romania, 4 in Colombia, 3 in Spain, 3 in Portugal, 3 in India, 2 in Bulgaria, 2 in Turkey, 2 in Argentina, and one each in such countries as: Great Britain, Czech Republic, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Mexico, Uruguay, Peru and Brazil.