Romanian Property News

The eagerly-awaited moment of Romania joining the EU is far behind us now. Gone is the enthusiasm of being a part of the European Union, everybody seems to move on these days, from the working class who realised that the EU accession did not bring them the expected western salaries to the politicians, eager to fight each other as vigorously as before.

Ready to spot the opportunity, the Romanians increased their prices well before January 2007 and, as a result, there was no price explosion so far, either for flats or villas throughout Romania. Based on the current offer and due to the increasing number of new developments, the prices are not likely to sky-rocket in the following months either. Further, due to most of new developments being at least half a year away from finishing, there will not be any ripples on the offer side for flats and villas.

To back these views, we have the support of several Romanian newspapers which highlighted in their articles the likely evolution of real estate prices in Romania for the year 2007. Jurnalul and Ziua Financiara both quote a 20% increase in market prices, based on a study produced by CBRE earlier this year. The articles continued by commenting on several other factors impacting on the current market prices, as well as their likely evolution: the pre-EU joining price increases, the (still) limited offer versus the spiralling demand, the two-tier market of “old” and “new” flats, and the relatively young real estate market in Romania, likely to fluctuate for the following couple of years. Finally, the same articles are keen to highlight an expected flooring of the luxury market prices, likely to increase only by at most 10% for this year.


The CBRE report comes to support one of their earlier studies from 2006, quoting similar figures for the 2007-2008 period. It is interesting that, in parallel with these mellow news, Wall Street (again, not the New York but the Bucharest one) has a completely different view. Quoting a different study, by DTZ, Wall Street claims that the price of flats increased by 20% already from January 2007 and is likely to maintain a similar growth throughout this year. Although disagreeing in terms of figures, the two quoted studies seem to agree that the price of both Romanian flats and villas will continue to increase in the near future, at least for a couple of years from now.

Last posts in Apartments

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