He heads the development operations of one of the biggest players in the local real estate market, AFI Europe and left Costa Rico for Romania, in a time when properties were ballooning in price. Tal Roma, Business Development Manager at AFI Europe, says that today Romania is paying the right price for the unjustified increases in real estate prices over the past few years.
“The real estate market is now paying the price for the last years’ frenzy”
In 2007, Tal Roma (photo) left the real estate market in Costa Rica behind and came in Romania to join the Israeli-based AFI Europe, part of Africa Israel group.
He found a similar market to the one in Costa Rica: prices were skyrocketing at an incredible speed, from 10 dollars to 100 within just a few months. Everybody wanted to invest in real estate, the landlords were enjoying the bargaining power, especially those who owned large land parcels and nobody seemed to be wondering for how long the prices would keep rising or by how much.
“It was incredible to see price increases like in Pipera. I’ve known persons who bought large land plots for 5 dollars per square meter and sell them afterwards for 2-3 hundred euros, dividing them into smaller parcels, destined for residential buildings. I believe we are now paying the price of those times, we are paying the price of an infant market, a purely speculative market”, representative of AFI Europe told Wall-Street.
Tal Roma says the crisis will mature players in the real estate industry, who will be more cautious over the next 5-10 years. Today, the prices of properties in Romania dropped to a decent level, affordable to a broader range of buyers. These buyers fall into two categories: persons who want to buy but don’t qualify for a banking loan and persons who afford to buy, but wait for the prices to go down.
“You don’t have to try to predic
