Skanste

Looking for office space in Skanste?

Skanste is Rīga's newest and greenest office cluster: Latvia's only BREEAM Outstanding building (Elemental), a fully-let Verde, and a €21.7m park opened in April 2025. Rents run €11–13/m²/month for Class B and older stock, up to €18 for the best Class A. With Rīga vacancy at 13.0% (CBRE, Q3 2025) and a growing speculative pipeline, tenants have real negotiating leverage here.

Skanste is Rīga's newest office cluster — 214.8 hectares in the Vidzeme Suburb, immediately north of the centre and inside the railway ring. It is also, with 1,932 residents, one of the emptiest places in the city, and that is the whole point. This was Skanstes purvs: marsh and flood meadow, then grazing land, allotment gardens, a hippodrome until 1965 and railway sidings. It was never laid out for housing, and it is being built out employment-first — roughly 12,000 residents and workers today against fewer than 2,000 residents. The daytime population is about six times the residential one.

The stock is the best in Latvia. Elemental Business Centre on Skanstes iela became the country's first BREEAM Outstanding building in June 2024. Verde on Roberta Hirša iela — two buildings, 30,000 m² of leasable space (45,000 m² including underground parking), BREEAM Excellent and nZEB — reached full occupancy across both, with 27 companies including Tietoevry, Swisscom, Roche and KPMG. Its owner immediately committed over €70 million to a further 37,000 m²: Verde C and D, landing in 2027 and 2028. Skanstes City adds nine buildings and around 55,000 m².

In April 2025 the city delivered what the district most lacked. Roughly 15 hectares of landscaped park opened within an 18-hectare project territory, along with four new streets and a rainwater pond system that restores the old floodplain — €21.7 million of public realm, and a direct answer to the marsh the place is named after.

Be clear-eyed about the rest. Skanste holds perhaps a fifth to a quarter of Rīga's 742,000 m² of competitive office stock — a real cluster, but not the CBD. The tram that anchored the Skanste 2030 vision lost its EU funding in 2019 and was never built, and public transport remains the district's structural weakness. With Rīga-wide vacancy at 13.0% and a speculative pipeline still growing, this is a tenant's market.

Skanstes iela and Kr. Valdemāra iela are the spine, with the city centre about 2.5 km away and Riga Airport roughly 13 km by road. Trams 5 and 9 run along Ganību dambis on the eastern edge, trolleybus 3 heads to Sarkandaugava, and buses 2, 11, 24 and 49 serve the area — but the district's interior is thinly served, and this is its structural weakness. The Skanste tram line, planned since 2016 as the centrepiece of the Skanste 2030 vision, lost its EU funding when the contract was terminated in 2019 and has not been built. Four new city streets — Lapeņu, Jāņa Dikmaņa, Jāņa Krūmiņa and Jāņa Daliņa, 1,972 m in total — opened with the park in April 2025. Since 1 November 2024, transit by vehicles over 3.5 t has been banned on Kr. Valdemāra iela between Zirņu and Skanstes ielas; the ban targets through traffic and does not apply to vehicles delivering or collecting within the zone. Parking typically runs €30–60 per space per month.

Rent excluding VAT and service charges