Karatal business centre in Almaty
Karatal is an eleven-storey Class B business centre at 90 Shevchenko Street in the Almaly district, commissioned in 2012. On its main characteristics it is a steady property without surprises, but it has one feature that, for a building of this height, determines everyday comfort more than any other: eleven floors are served by two lifts. Below is what is confirmed, what the sources do not contain and what is worth asking about before signing a lease.
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Building details
- Building class: B
- Address: улица Шевченко, 90
- District: Алмалинский
- City: Алматы
- Year built: 2012
- Floors: 11
- Rentable area: 14 500 м²
Available space
There are no open listings for this building right now: owners do not publish every block. We will put together options on request — send a request or browse offices in Almaty.
Offices nearby
These are office listings across Almaty, not units in this building.
- Помещение 400 кв.м. — 400 м², Алматы, 4 248 000 ₸
- трёхуровневый офис 590 кв.м. 3 500 000 тг — 590 м², Бостандыкский район , 3 500 000 ₸
- Офис 150 м2, 1400000 — 150 м², Бостандыкский, 1 400 000 ₸
- Офис 135 м2, 1300 000 — 135 м², Бостандыкский, 1 300 000 ₸
- Офис 90 м2 , 94500000 — 90 м², Бостандыкский, 94 500 000 ₸
- Офис 90 м2 , 650 000 — 90 м², Бостандыкский, 650 000 ₸
Other business centres nearby
See also: the Almaty business centre directory, Nurly Tau business centre, office rent in Almaty.
What the building is
The year of construction is 2012, the building has eleven floors and the class is B. The class here is stated consistently by three sources, including the business centre’s own website, which for our selection is rather the exception: usually a building’s own site either says nothing or argues with the catalogues.
The lettable area is 14,500 sq m and the ceiling height 3 metres. A separate figure for the total area of the building is not published by the sources at all: both the own website and the catalogues give only the lettable area. We do not insert a calculated value here — that would be a guess rather than a fact.
Layouts are offered in two variants — open plan and cellular — and the open-plan units, according to the aggregators’ descriptions, run up to 250 sq m, while the overall range of offers is given as 90 to 2,500 sq m. We quote these figures with a caveat: they appeared only in search snippets, and the source pages themselves did not open when accessed directly. The structure of the building is described as monolithic — with the same caveat.
- surface parking
- round-the-clock security and video surveillance
- electronic access control system
- natural ventilation, local air conditioning
- open-plan and cellular layouts
- ceiling height of 3 metres
Two lifts for eleven floors
This is the main practical question about the building, and it is confirmed from two directions. The descriptions of the property list two goods-and-passenger lifts. Independently of the descriptions, the tenants themselves say the same: two lifts cannot cope in a building of this height, and they run slowly.
The combination of eleven floors, 14,500 sq m of lettable area and two lifts means a predictable queue at the morning peak, at lunchtime and at the end of the working day. The higher your floor, the more it costs you: on the ninth to eleventh floors the difference between two lifts and four is measured in tens of minutes a week per person.
This can and should be checked in person, and the check takes fifteen minutes. Come between a quarter to nine and half past nine, stand in the lobby and watch what happens. If you are considering the upper floors, take the lift precisely at that time rather than at a quiet midday, when everything works perfectly.
The parking is described in three different ways
Here the descriptions do not merely disagree over figures — they describe different things, and it is worth unpicking. The building’s own website and the industry entries give open surface parking, without a number of spaces. Some tenants speak of an underground car park. Others say that you are not let into the car park and that there is no space.
All three descriptions may be correct at the same time. There is surface parking, but with few spaces; an underground level may exist and be available to a limited circle of tenants; and visitors are meanwhile not admitted. That is exactly what the parking of a small business centre in dense central development usually looks like.
No source publishes a specific number of parking spaces, so the number of spaces allocated to the unit and the procedure for issuing visitor passes are the first thing to find out from the management service. The phrase “there is parking” means nothing here.
The stated ventilation and how it actually works
The building’s own website and the industry entries give natural ventilation and local air conditioning. Formally the description is correct, but practice contradicts it directly: tenants speak of stuffiness in the offices and of ventilation that cannot cope. This needs checking on site, and preferably on a warm day.
In substance there is no contradiction here — there is a difference between the stated solution and its sufficiency. Natural ventilation means that the air supply is provided by the windows and by infiltration rather than by a mechanical system. In a densely occupied office on the sunny side this may not be enough in summer, and the stuffiness in the offices comes from precisely that.
The practical conclusion: if you have dense seating or the space faces south, the climate question has to be solved by the fit-out design — adding an air handling unit or sizing the split systems with a margin — rather than relying on the building’s general solution. And the space is worth viewing on a warm day after lunch.
Who works here
The tenant mix of the building is retail and service rather than corporate. The most conspicuous resident is the head office of the footwear chain Intertop; the floor it occupies is given differently in different sources, so we do not name a specific number. Of the rest, the confirmed ones are the estate agency Avenue Real Estate on the eighth floor, the Eazy Coffee coffee shop on the ground floor, the travel agency Qaztravel, the trading company IPAR International Kazakhstan, a bank branch on the ground floor in office 16, a yoga centre on the third floor, the company MUK-Computers in office 41, a library in office 101 and a consultancy in office 71 on the seventh floor.
A children’s swimming school operating in the building deserves a separate mention — a detail that immediately explains the evening and weekend traffic with children and adds load to those very two lifts.
A full list of organisations for the building is not present in the available data. The companies given here are confirmed individually. The obligatory caveat: leases end and are renewed, and the mix reflects the open data at the time of collection.
What the sources do not contain
For this building the list of gaps is a noticeable one, and it is more honest to set it out in full than to leave the reader with a sense of completeness.
The developer and the architect have not been found. The only lead is the title of a page on the site of a certain development company where the business centre is listed among its projects, but the site itself did not open once across several attempts: the domain does not resolve. This cannot be treated as confirmation, so we do not publish the name. The management company has likewise not been established.
Also not found: the seismic resistance, the presence of a backup power supply, the typical floor plate area, the number of parking spaces, the total area of the building and any environmental certificates. For a tenant this means that the technical conversation will have to be held with the management service directly rather than checked against a catalogue. A separate warning: one third-party directory publishes this business centre at 108 Shevchenko — that is a catalogue error, it is one and the same property at 90 Shevchenko.
Location and day-to-day operation
The nearest metro station is Almaly, about 1.33 km away, some seventeen minutes on foot. Shevchenko Street at this point is a quiet central street, and the location here is the main strength of the address: it is pleasant to walk in any direction from the building, and there are coffee shops and shops around.
The overall feel of this address comes out contradictory, and averaging it is pointless. More informative is what shows up time after time and can be checked at a viewing — the lifts, the ventilation and the parking. Those are exactly what is examined below.
Among the strengths are the location, the comfortable temperature in the common areas, the work of individual tenants, the friendliness of some of the staff, the regular cleaning and the spaciousness of the units. The weak points are the parking, the slow working of the two lifts, the stuffiness in the offices, a brusque manner at the reception desk and the dated interior: the building needs refurbishment, and it shows. One more point relates not to the building but to the marketing practices of one of the companies working inside it, and there is no need to mix that up with the property itself.
What to clarify before signing the lease
For this building the questions fall into two groups: what has to be checked on foot and what has to be requested as a document.
- take the lift up to your floor at the morning peak rather than at a quiet time
- how many parking spaces are allocated to the unit and whether guests are admitted to the car park
- view the space on a warm day after lunch — the ventilation is natural
- the total area of the building and the area of the unit by measurement, not by listing
- the seismic resistance according to the documents — the sources do not state it
- whether there is a backup power supply
- who acts as the management company and how maintenance requests are submitted
- the condition of the common areas on your floor and the plans for refurbishment
Questions and answers
How many lifts does the Karatal business centre have?
Two goods-and-passenger lifts for eleven floors. This is confirmed from two directions: by the description of the building and independently by the practice of the tenants, who say that two lifts cannot cope and run slowly. For a building of this height with 14,500 sq m of lettable area this is a bottleneck worth checking in person at the morning peak.
In what year was the building constructed and what class is it?
It was commissioned in 2012 and the class is B. The class is stated consistently by three sources, including the business centre’s own website — for our selection that is rather the exception, since usually a building’s own site either says nothing or argues with the catalogues.
What is the total area of the building?
The sources publish no separate figure for the total area. Only the lettable area is known — 14,500 sq m; it is given both by the own website and by the catalogues. We do not insert a calculated value: that would be a guess rather than a fact.
Does the business centre have parking?
The descriptions disagree. The own website and the industry entries give open surface parking without a number of spaces; some tenants mention an underground car park; others say that you are not let into the car park. Nobody publishes a specific number of spaces, so the number allocated to the unit and the procedure for issuing visitor passes have to be established with the management service.
Who is the developer and who manages the building?
Not established. The only lead is the title of a page on the site of a development company where the business centre is listed among its projects, but the domain did not open once across several attempts, so this cannot be treated as confirmation. The architect and the management company have likewise not been found in any source.
How can I find out available space and rents?
Rents for the building are not published in open sources. According to the aggregators’ descriptions, units are offered in a range of roughly 90 to 2,500 sq m and open-plan layouts up to 250 sq m, but these figures appeared only in search snippets and are not directly confirmed. Send a request and we will ask for the current options and put together comparable offers in the Almaly district.
See also
ТОО «Nurly Tau Realty (Нурлы Тау Реалти)», БИН 171040029589, 050000, г. Алматы, Бостандыкский район, пр. Аль-Фараби, дом 15, н.п. 21г. Тел. +7 702 444 89 98, info@nurlytau.kz.