Real estate projects worth 10bn euros vanish in three months

Ten real estate companies have announced the postponement or cancellation of 120 projects in the past three months. 50,000 apartments, seven shopping centres and a lot of office buildings put on hold or cancelled altogether is the situation surfacing after the first three months during which real estate investors have grown aware that they are facing a crisis situation, in which banks are no longer able or willing to pour more money in real estate, reveals a ZF survey conducted on the basis of data reported on the market. In fact, the number of projects developers are shelving is much higher, considering the biggest players in real estate have in recent years built up portfolios of hundreds of hectares of land in and outside Bucharest, which are now frozen. “On the domestic market, we have second-tier developers, with weaker reputations, which have been trying to speculate on the shortage of commercial space and threw themselves headfirst to buy land. They were not expecting this crisis which seems to be hurting us more than other states in the region because it proved we don’t have enough domestic capital,” commented Razvan Gheorghe, CEO of Cushman & Wakefield Activ Consulting real estate consultancy. On the other hand, the biggest number of delayed projects was registered on the housing segment, where some developers are happy they did not start construction works last year.