Codrin Matei, Principal Partner at Crosspoint Real Estate: “I think that we have a lot of domestic capital [and] that at this moment probably the investment market will be helped a lot by domestic capital.”
During a panel dedicated to investments on the Romanian office market held at CEDER 2023, experts discussed the challenges affecting a market which they described as being under attack since 2020, due to factors such as the pandemic, work from home and inflation. Despite the currently uncertain global banking environment and “a tendency of investors to be purposefully underweight in real estate” (as Robert Neale, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Portland Trust expressed it), Codrin Matei pointed out that in Romania, people adapted with every crisis and that this resilience was already visible in the market.
Marian V. Popa, Managing Director for Romania at Globalworth, added: „I think that at the time being we have a good market. […] 2022 was a year in which a lot of financing has been done locally. I think we should start to acknowledge we are the 13th largest power in the EU (…) and should react like one”.
In later discussions, Laurențiu Lazăr, Managing Partner and Head of Investment at Colliers pointed out that for a while already, he had not seen a lot of new investors coming in Romania, mentioning that an analysis conducted by his company had shown 53% of capital invested last year and in Q1 of this year was coming from CEE and Romania. Speaking about domestic capital, he added: “Now we have that, which is a good fact. I do believe that in the coming period, the players which know better the market will be more interested in the market than the ones which […] have to qualify Romania as a country before [they] do any investment.”
