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During the pandemic, banks continued to finance ongoing commercial real estate projects but they are more careful with financing new ones, looking for higher corporate credentials and imposing more restrictive conditions to fulfil. Monia Dobrescu, Partner at Romanian law firm Mușat & Asociații talked to Property Forum about the pandemic’s effects on client relationships and provided market insight from the legal advisor’s perspective.

Property developer Atenor says it has concluded the sale of Hermes Business Campus in Bucharest to Adventum Group, an investment manager focused on Central and Eastern Europe. 

Transactions in Romania’s commercial real estate market amounted to €298 million in the first half of the year, down 23% compared to the same period of 2020, according to a report by real estate consultancy Cushman & Wakefield Echinox. 

In Romania, the hotel transaction volume reached about €9.5 million in 2020, down 87% from approximately €75 million in 2019, Cushman & Wakefield Echinox data shows.

After a year in which the volume of investments amounted to about €900 million, 2021 will not be as rosy. Colliers consultants foresee a total volume for commercial real estate transactions in excess of €500 million. They also see room for a slight decrease in yields by the end of the year for prime office and prime industrial, if the economy, political and monetary system will be satisfactory.

The pandemic has affected all economic sectors, and the real estate market is no exception. However, Skanska Romania ended the first year of the pandemic with the sale of two buildings in the Campus 6 project in Bucharest for €97 million, one of the largest transactions on the market. Aurelia Luca, EVP Operations Hungary and Romania at Skanska talked to Property Forum about the company's operations in Romania.

The office space market in Bucharest registered a total volume of transactions of approximately 240,000 sqm in 2020, a level similar to that of 2015, CBRE data shows.

The total volume invested in real estate assets in Romania reached €914 million in 2020, a 28% increase compared 2019, according to the Romania Investment Marketbeat launched by Cushman & Wakefield Echinox.

The COVID-19 pandemic did not affect real estate transactions in Romania. During 2020, a total of 602,805 properties were traded, 62,625 more than in 2019, according to the Romanian National Agency for Cadastre and Land Registration (ANCPI). 

The number of transactions on the Hungarian housing market totalled 128,386 last year, down by about 5% compared to 2015. This, however, is not a sign of a weak market, as it rather reflects an upturn in the sector for new homes. Buyers have been signing a huge number of pre-contracts directly with the developers and that will appear in the statistics only when the properties are taken into use, i.e. in about one or two years.