Price of land in Baneasa - an ever increasing offer throughout the past two years
Before the revolution that finished the communist era in Romania, Baneasa was just another suburb of Bucharest, famous for a couple of factories, the zoo, a secondary airport (when comparing Baneasa and Otopeni, think Luton versus Heathrow), and the nearby Baneasa forest. Past the 1990s, Baneasa transformed itself into the land-of-rich-and-more-or-less famous. With houses being built close to each other, small plots with narrow roads, the price of land plots in Baneasa increased steadily one step ahead any other area in Romania.
Just like some of the TV personalities, Baneasa is famous for…being famous. The area does not offer any special advantages, apart maybe from its distance to Bucharest. While, maybe, initially, the nearby forest represented an incentive for residential growth, these days it is rather difficult to still see green areas due to the almost overcrowded developments, in quite a few cases actually ahead of the road infrastructure. Yes, even now, you can still see expensive posh villas with temporary roads between them. And again yes, this is only a temporary situation, as infrastructure progresses steadily through the area.
So, away from generic conclusions, what are the prices like in the area? The graph below summarises the evolution of prices for land plots in Baneasa between February 2005 and February 2007.
Due to its partially speculative aspects, the land market in Baneasa shows, even after averaging prices over three months, certain spikes. The statistics above were produced from a 343 offers between 2005 and 2007, including land plots smaller than a hectar. From an initial larger number of offers, we filtered the ones higher than €1000/sqm (yes, there were quite a few of them, most of them grouped closer to present) because of their likely speculative nature. Even without these figures, you can still see the increase from an average €134/sqm back in February 2005 to €276/sqm in February 2007. Even though there was no “adaptive” filtering (this calculation was done just now, while writing the post), the growth figure of 206% matches incredibly close the one seen in Otopeni (see the previous post). This shows clearly that, in spite of high prices to begin with, the market remained strong and pushed steadily upwards the average prices.
What changes will the future bring to Baneasa? The only clear change at the moment is the ever-shrinking forest, seen as too “expensive” to remain in place by the developers. One by one, super-/ultra-/hyper-markets took away forest land, followed closely by residential areas and associated infrastructure. Leaving aside the long-term green concerns, Baneasa remain one of the posh areas of Bucharest, sought-after by the medium-high class, with expensive housing and high land prices.
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Posted: March 18th, 2007 under Land, Reviews.
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