KPMG: Real estate market expects strong developers

The accession to the European Union is turning Romania into a target for strong foreign players who conduct investments over long periods. “So far, the developers coming to Romania are contractors who intend to turn a profit as quickly as possible. The entry into the European Union will bring along increasingly more investors who intend to develop long-term projects,” stated Victor Kevehazi, senior partner with consulting company KPMG Romania. However, many of the large investors specialising in real estate hold back from investing on the local market, choosing other countries in the region instead, one of the reasons for this being Romania’s complicated fiscal system. “In Romania, a transaction on the real estate market takes a very long time to complete. For instance, we had a client, an experienced foreign developer, who was interested in investing on the Romanian market, but decided to withdraw due to the technical and fiscal problems he came across,” added Kevehazi. As a result, Romania will be in constant competition with other countries in the region. “But we should not only compare ourselves with countries in our vicinity and should heavily promote ourselves in order to become serious competitors with Anglo-Saxon countries, Russia, France etc, when an investor decides to make a real estate investment,” explains Kevehazi.