Co-owner of Standard One at the Forbes Development 2026 forum

On 11 June, Kyiv hosted the forum , where developers, architects, investors and government officials discussed housing construction, investment in the sector, Ukraine’s demographic map, urban planning reform and how communities compete for investors.Forbes Development

The programme included a panel discussion, ‘Speaking the Same Language: How Ukrainian Developers Secure Foreign Funding’, moderated by Roman Yemets, an adviser on commercial property investment. Speakers included Oleksandr Lakey (City One Development), Dmytro Kovalchuk (Alterra Group) and Oleksandr Ovcharenko, co-owner of Standard One.

A finished product rather than empty promises

Oleksandr Ovcharenko stressed that foreign investors’ key requirements stay the same before, during and after the war.

‘A foreign investor has to see a finished product and a ready-made business model, not fine promises and pretty pictures. They must understand all the risks they carry, the payback period, the return and, crucially, the exit from the investment.’

Standard One took exactly this approach with its first Build-to-Rent project, S1 VDNG: of its 660 flats, 235 were bought by non-residents of Ukraine. Israel leads by country (160–170 flats), followed by the US (35 flats), the European Union, Switzerland and the UK (15 flats), and South Korea.

Build-to-Rent is well understood internationally: in Poland, for example, the rental housing market has grown tenfold in recent years. The format is also familiar to Israeli investors, who were the largest buyers in Standard One’s first two developments: similar income-generating models are actively developing in their home market, where yields on comparable projects do not exceed 4.5%, while Standard One projects offer yields of 10% or more in US dollars, excluding capital appreciation.

‘We have brought the market a real product – a real model that has worked in the developed countries of the European Union, the US and the UK for several decades.’

Transparency as a prerequisite for Western partners

According to Ovcharenko, any investor, Ukrainian or foreign, cares about four things: location, tenant demand, professional management and predictable income. These are the things we are building Standard One around today, as a single ecosystem.

We are moving towards the S1 Group model, which brings together Standard One, the developer that creates the product; S1 Property, the income-generating property management company; and S1 REIT, an investment product that lets you become a co-owner of income-generating rental property with a small investment (from 1,000 UAH).

The developer’s portfolio includes five buildings: S1 VDNG, S1 Obolon, S1 Poznyaki, S1 Nyvky and S1 Terminal. Ovcharenko noted that S1 Group has options for different investor needs: a choice of locations (Kyiv’s right or left bank), formats and property types (flats or apartments) at different stages of development. For those who want to become the sole owner of an apartment, the entry point is $60,000–70,000. On S1 VDNG, the fund’s certificates have already delivered a yield of 12.4–12.6%, and a certificate bought a year ago and sold now would have yielded 13%, thanks to the monthly revaluation.

S1 Poznyaki, the company’s largest residential development to date, is now in active development and open for investment on the most favourable early-stage terms.

‘S1 Poznyaki is a 24-storey building with 756 apartments and a total floor area of 29,500 m². This is the project that’s in active development right now, and now is when investors can come in on the best terms and get extra capital growth by entering early’, Ovcharenko stressed.