High real estate prices, lack of seriousness chase away more and more investors

      “More Real Estate Services”, one of the real estate brokering companies in Romania, participated at the “Expo Real” Fair in Munich during October 5-7. “More” shared the stand together with Proiect Bucuresti, the largest Romanian architectural, engineering and urban planning office. After the Fair, the Romanian companies realized that there are fewer and fewer foreign investors interested in Romania, because of the lack of seriousness and the unrealistic prices from our country.
      “Expo Real” is the one of the biggest Real Estate Fairs in the world. As generally expected, this year’s Expo Real showed a decline in attendance of around 15 per cent to 21,000 visitors from 73 countries (24,800 from 78 countries in 2008).
      “More” and “Proiect Bucuresti” presented their services to over 50 companies interested. Unfortunately most of them were not searching for investments in the country. “Just 2 years ago, we had over 140 potential investors and we did not manage to absorb an enormous amount of over two billions that people intended to invest here. In 2008 we spoke with 35 companies with potential interest. This year we had just five investors, not even six! But their quality was very high, representing large sums of investments. They are willing to place today over EUR 200 M for the right assets, which is not a figure to be ignored. Also plenty of others want to know, as they intend to check the market thoroughly during 2010,” Ilias Papageorgiadis, CEO of MORE Real Estate Services declared in a press conference, yesterday.
      “If there was a lesson by this exhibition, it was definitely the demand of the market for more seriousness, more integrity and honesty in the business”, Papageorgiadis added. He expects that the real estate market, in 2010, will be more stabile, after that, in 2011, it will be a small growth and, as the banks will start the refunding, in 2012, we’ll have good prices on the market.
      On the other hand, Avi Shloush, general director at “Ghica Plaza” is expecting stagnation, in the next two-three years, concerning new real estate projects, because of the lack of financing.

Source: Nine’O'Clock, 21.10.2009
http://www.nineoclock.ro/index.php?page=detalii&categorie=business&id=20091021-515916