Bucharest joins worldwide billion dollar city club

The value of real estate deals last year in Romania topped that in Hungary last year, which recorded only about $1.7 billion of such deals, and the one in neighbor Bulgaria by almost $1 billion.
Despite being more than other neighbor countries recorded and double the 2006 figure, the value of real estate deals in Romania last year was close to the value of a single deal elsewhere on the global market, the EUR 1.9 billion sale of Coeur Defense office building in Paris to Lehman Brothers.
The biggest deal last year was worth EUR EUR 3.6 billion, the price tag of the City Center Casino and Resort in Las Vegas, still under development, which was bought by Dubai World.
Of the 32 European countries in Real Capital Analytics' study, Romania ranks somewhere in the middle of the list in terms of money involved in the sale of commercial properties in the country last year.
Real Capital Analytics counted 52 real estate deals in Romania last year, of which 28 involved development sites and the rest completed properties.
Bucharest, however, enjoys a higher profile company among cities which hosted at least $1 billion of real estate deals last year. Bucharest accounted for $1.9 billion of real estate deals in the country last year, according to the report, more than half of the country total. The city is thus above Brussels, Edinburgh, Budapest, Dublin, Saint Petersburg and Vienna.
In total, there are 33 European cities in the list of billion dollar cities. “It is interesting to note that six of the other billion dollar cities are located in Eastern Europe, including Russia,” found the report.
Being one of these cities means having a place on the map of large real estate investors looking to place their capital. “With prices in the major global markets such as London, Hong Kong and New York near records, property investors are broadening their horizons to invest in secondary cities and emerging markets,” the report adds.
The US towns which made up the bulk of billion dollar cities are expected to see less activity in 2008, as an effect of the credit crunch. Overall, international real estate is likely to see an end to the bull market, a situation which was visible at the end of last year, according to Real Capital Analytics specialists. Optimism will continue only in Asia, and transaction volumes will slow, while cross-border investments and mobility of capital will increase. The global volume of commercial real estate deals exceeded $1 trillion in 2007.

Corina Saceanu