While I was … raped again (paying for gold each and every extra kilo I had in my luggage), my brother Grigoris was still at our stand, instead of enjoying the warm Friday’s sun. I was traveling back to Bucharest (with the super expensive Air France and its nice empty planes with the very polite flight attendants), while he was returning back to Thessaloniki, together with two very good friend of ours. He was flying by Swiss, few hours after me, so he decided to stay at our stand as much as possible. (We usually have this habit as family, we don’t abandon our work for fun and we are very proud [...]

In few hours I will be traveling back to Bucharest (via Paris). Today the exhibition ends around 12.00 – 13.00 (workers will start deconstructing the stands after this time) and MIPIM 2009 will be history in few hours. I am writing these lines being inside the exhibition, while we have started packing our boxes… (with the usual unnecessary materials and editions I collected from all around, bad habit, I can not stop it…) To be honest, I expected more people to come all these days… The second day was almost like the first one, not even 10 meetings. The third day was better, it reminded me [...]

The no. 1 Real Estate exhibition of the World showed us more than clearly that the World is still approaching cautiously the available investment opportunities. Half of the private companies which were present as exhibitors last year are absent now, most of them did not even appear as visitors. The vast majority of investors are not here, not only missing from our stand, but missing from the whole exhibition. Some few hundreds of people in total can not be compared to the many thousands of the previous years. But this new era brings up to surface Quality! Yesterday I had two excellent meetings, [...]

Hello and have a wonderful week! Yesterday I returned from Greece back to Romania, so as to have the time to finish 6 (!) meetings (2 last night and 4 today) before I go to the airport in the afternoon and fly to Nice. From there Cannes is just half an hour drive and it is our final destination for this week. My company, MORE International Invest, will participate once more to the no. 1 Real Estate exhibition of the world, being one of the two Romanian agencies who do this. The predictions speak for 20 – 40% less visitors than last year and I am really curious to see what will happen there. Except [...]

“Call them, are they still going to make it?”. “Man, are you crazy? It is one of the most important Real Estate exhibitions of the world, in the top 3 of Europe”. “Ask… with this crisis, maybe they will think more wisely and they will cancel it”. Fortunately for me, my friend was wrong in one of his very rare times… This week, from Sunday until Wednesday, I was in Munich, participating (together with 3 colleagues of mine) with a stand in EXPO REAL exhibition. My company, MORE International Invest, was there for the second time, presenting to international investors our approach [...]

It was raining again, as it happened in all the previous days. But even while raining, Madrid is still lovely. This is why last night I was walking on some of the main boulevards, just to relax and think, after a hard day (ok, I admit it, I was also checking the marketing mix on the high streets of the city). The day was really full: Meetings with some of the top Spanish companies, active in Romanian market, an interesting discussion with the economic counsellor of Romania in Spain, mr Constantin Ene, my speech in the conference, the interesting approach to markets by the other co-speakers, the [...]

The first time I remember myself watching sports was in the spring of 1979. It was a game between Panionios and Olympiakos for the Greek Cup, two Greek football teams. My family had a black and white television, Olympiakos lost 2 – 1 (Panionios later on won the Cup). I, not even 4 years old, felt sympathy for the one who lost and I became his supporter. Since then and especially since 1982, I have been following almost all the major events, until 2000, when more or less I stopped being so enthusiastic. In International exhibitions you meet people from all over the world. “People who have nothing [...]