Huge investment

The Triester Straße in Vienna is the most important street running south in the Austrian capital. Apart from the motorway in Vienna, it is the busiest street in the city. The trading company Sochor has been operating here in the Triester Straße for a good 70 years on premises of around four hectares. Due to Vienna’s expansion, Sochor’s location has moved almost automatically from the outskirts more and more into the centre. Nowadays, it is surrounded by districts strongly influenced by workers and students. One of these, Favoriten, is the most populated district of Vienna (approx. 187 000 inhabitants) and has a percentage of foreigners of well over 20 per cent.
After the construction of the building materials company in 2011 on the same site, the Sochor family has taken their expansion a step further on the Triester Straße and built the biggest Obi store in Vienna. The Sochor consortium, franchisee of Obi since 1995, has invested approx. € 30 mio in the new DIY store. The old DIY store with 2 500 m² on the same site, was closed in June 2013 and demolished. After only 14 months of construction and installation, the new site was reopened on 4 September 2014. In total, Sochor has invested approx. € 50 mio in the past four years in the site on the Triester Straße.

The new Obi store not only offers its customers a shopping area, which has increased from 2 500 m² to 10 000 m² and is spread over two levels, but also a 3 000 m² garden centre. Additionally there are 249 parking spaces – including a park deck with extra wide parking spaces of up to 3.6 m, a filling station for electric cars and bicycles and on top of that, it is an ecologically sustainable building design. This DIY store has created 140 new jobs for the employees.
“Our DIY store is capable of targeting 300 000 customers just in the immediate catchment area alone. Thus we offer the most central DIY store range of goods in the centre of Vienna in a completely new dimension and in the best location too – we can’t get any nearer to the customer that that”, emphasised Markus Hutschinski, CEO of the DIY stores A. Sochor & Co GmbH.
The Sochor consortium, is one of the most well-known building materials and DIY store operators in Vienna and the surrounding area, with its…