Biris: Crisis did not affect Upground's sale

Gabriel Biris, managing partner of law firm Biris Goran, which assisted the developers of the Upground project in its sale to a real estate division of Deutsche Bank for 340 million euros, says the price of the transaction was not affected by the crisis on the external markets, with adjustments being made upwards during the eight-month negotiations. This deal is a sign that good projects will find buyers. The crisis will act as a “sanitising factor”, in that only healthy projects will receive funding. “However, the speculators who bought cheap and used their own money, will not have difficulties,” says the lawyer. The transaction has been the longest in the firm’s history and is currently a record-high deal on the Romanian real estate market, given the decline in the number of transactions, and the stagnation or even a decline in housing prices on the Bucharest market. The acquisition required over 1,000 hours of work for the lawyers at Biris Goran, while the sealing of the deal, done in the office of Nestor Nestor Diculescu Kingston Petersen law firm, which represented the buyer, entailed the signing of around 4,000 pages of documents.