Bucharest’s number of newly completed homes within large residential complexes will hit a new record high this year, but almost half of them have yet to be sold.

A year ago, when the crisis seemed far away from the Romanian real estate market, some of the more pessimistic residential brokers talked about the large number of apartments which would be completed, and whose windows would not be lit in the evening, pointing to the fact that a significant percentage of the new homes had been acquired by investors, and not by people who would be living in them. According to estimates, such apartments are expected to account for 30 to 50% of the overall number of homes sold, most of which are due for completion this year.

2009 should, indeed, bring Bucharest the largest number of newly-completed homes included in residential complexes with at least 100 apartments, according to data collected by BUSINESS Magazin for its supplement ”The Real Estate Market – Exit from Crisis?”. A series of large projects, whose construction started in previous year - in full boom of the residential market, such as Asmita Gardens, Confort City, Cosmopolis, Rasarit de Soare and InCity will be fully or partially completed this year, with the ten largest to total over 7,000 units. However, the number of those that will remain in the dark will be much bigger than previously estimated, if we look at the fact that over 40% of the apartments and homes to be completed this year have yet to be sold.

”We have around 35% homes available for sale. We will not cut prices, not even by 0.1%, this has in fact been our policy in the last few months. We have yet to make a decision on the apartments to be completed, and which will remain unsold by then,” says Atena Tiplic, sales manager of the 765-apartment Asmita Gardens project, which will be completed in two stages, the last of which this autumn. The same sales policy is pursued by Conarg Real Estate, developer of Rasarit de Soare, one of the projects which performed well at its launch and which sold around 500 units in the first few months. ”We have 450 apartments left to sell, but we won’t cut prices, this is not a solution,” says the developer’s manager, Romeo Cazanescu. He grounds this policy on the fact that the developer had launched the project at the beginning of last year with prices below the market average.