The demand for industrial spaces and plots increased exponentially, considering that the foreign direct investments in Romania will reach a record level of 7 - 10 billion euros this year, according to data provided by Romanian Agency for Foreign Investments.

Local authorities can hardly cope with the market's pressure, with many business opportunities having been squandered, as it happened with Montupet, a French company that chose Bulgaria instead of Romania.

Some entrepreneurs from Transylvania and Banat noticed this trend and set up a new business: private industrial parks. Requiring investments of a few million euros, industrial parks are usually built with public funds and are owned by local authorities, which can make the area viable and can attract European money or money from the state budget, in a bid to derive profits. Yet, there are some private investors who turned this niche into something more than a simple real estate investment and, in some areas, the private industrial parks became an alternative to those built by the local authorities.

In such a park, the leasing price for 1 square metre of land revolves around 3 euro per year, but, as for the private companies administrating the industrial parks, they prefer building their own production facilities and renting them, as the incomes derived from the rent are substantially higher and can reach 5 euros for 1 square metre of shed per month.

"Although most of the companies coming to us, want to lease the plot and to invest in production facilities by themselves, it would be much more advantageous for us to rent our own production sheds. Thus, we could recover our investment much sooner," Adriana Cristea, general manager of Arc Parc Industrial Dej, the company that manages Dej Industrial park, told ZF.

The company's management estimates the investments in infrastructure in th