Cluj, increasingly inaccessible. Real estate analysis: The municipality is the most expensive city in Romania on the housing market and in the first quarter of 2024/ Prices have increased by 14% in two years

The most expensive city for buyers is Cluj-Napoca: here, the average asking price for homes for sale reached 2,631 euros/useful square meter in the first trimester.

In the first quarter of 2024, the asking prices for housing, at the national level, registered an advance of about 8% compared to the similar interval in 2023, the average reaching 1,563 euros/useful square meter, according to the data analyzed by the Imobiliare.ro platform. The owners in Brașov and those in Iași are less willing to let the price go than those in Cluj-Napoca or Timișoara: if in the first cities we are talking about a negotiation margin of 2.4%, in the two large regional centers in the west of the country this reaches 3.5%.

Cluj-Napoca continues to stand out significantly in terms of prices compared to the other big cities in
Romania, the analysis shows: Owners and developers on the local residential market have come to request in the first three months of 2024 an average sale price for apartments of 2,631 euros/useful square meter.

According to Imobiliare.ro data, the increase in asking prices is almost 4% compared to the end of 2023, but exceeds 14% if we refer to the situation 2 years ago.

According to the quarterly analysis, compared to the same period last year, at the national level transactions continued to grow (+5.4%), and the demand for residential properties is heading towards the level of good years (+3%), at the expense of rents. “However, this turnaround is not without its challenges, which on the one hand come from factors external to the market (geopolitical instability is accentuated with the latest episode in the Middle East, fiscal unpredictability, given that we have elections ahead of us ), as well as domestic – the continuous decrease in the new offer in recent years”, said Daniel Crainic, Imobiliare.ro marketing director.

In the first quarter of 2024 it was visible an advance of about 8% in of the national average asking price for residential propertiesif we refer to the similar interval from 2023, up to the value of 1,563 euros/useful square meter.

The most expensive city for buyers is Cluj-Napoca. Here, the average asking price for homes for sale reached 2,631 euros/useful square meter in the first trimester. Brasov ranks second in the national ranking with an average of 1,789 euros/useful square meterwhile Bucharest is only in fifth place with 1,578 euros/usable square meter.

Source: Imobiliare.ro

How to negotiate?

“Owners and developers are not willing, most of the time, to make significant discounts, either because of their own costs or because they have a certain emotional attachment to the home in question. Of course, we are not discussing here special situations such as those in which we want to speed up the sales process or those in which we are discussing packages intended for investors, which include several properties”, according to the Imobiliare.ro analysis. The negotiation margin – calculated as the percentage difference between the transaction price and the buyer’s last asking price – is actually quite small in the country’s main cities. Owners from Brașov and Iași, for example, are less willing to let the price go than those from Cluj-Napoca or Timișoara. If in the first cities we are talking about a negotiation margin of 2.4%, in the two large regional centers in the west of the country it reaches 3.5%, according to the data analyzed by Imobiliare.ro.

On the Bucharest residential market, at the beginning of this year, a negotiation margin of 3.9% was met, while in the case of the owners in Constanța, we note that it reaches the highest level among the big cities, at 4.2%.

“Buyer interest remains at a good level at the beginning of this year, but the supply of houses and apartments available on the market is limited. If we take into account the current conditions on the credit market and the favorable perspectives that can be seen in the medium term, we can say that we can expect to see further increases in housing prices in the next period”, claim the representatives of Imobiliare.ro.

“With the return of demand, real estate prices are increasing. Further, additional pressure is generated by the decrease in supply, which not only can, but certainly will put pressure on prices, especially as the long-awaited moment of interest rate cuts is near. These things, combined with the unbridled appetite for owner status, risk keeping uneducated buyers in the zone of compromise developments – in terms of quality, location, areas – and many and cheap suburban projects, whose value is not only it will not grow over time, but will remain absolutely derisory. Beware of the price compromise! The capital is full of such examples which, by the way, largely explains why Bucharest is overtaken by Cluj-Napoca, Brașov and soon by all the secondary cities, although it has entire neighborhoods with an average price of almost 3,000 euros/sqm” , announced Crainic.

What are buyers looking for? The main trends in the residential market

In the first three months of this year many of the buyers turned their attention, as a priority, to new homes, completed starting in 2020, according to Imobiliare.ro data. However, the old market is gaining ground in many of the big cities.

For every old house in Bucharest or apartment located in a building built before 2020 there were two potential buyers in the market, while for each new home in Constant four potential buyers have shown interest.

The only big city where the offer for sale has increased at the beginning of the year it was Brasov. Buyers had a choice of 6,100 houses and apartments, 2% more compared to the beginning of last year. At the opposite pole was the Capital, where the supply of housing decreased by almost 20%. Even under these conditions, Bucharest has no rival at the national level. From a total of 88,900 houses and apartments listed for sale in the six largest cities in the country, more than half were in the Capital.

An increase of 5.2% could also be observed in real estate transactions. Between January and March, they sold out nationwide nearly 145,500 houses, plots and apartments, according to the data of the National Cadastre and Real Estate Advertising Agency. A spectacular evolution was registered in the case of the county IASI where almost 7,600 properties were sold, a fact that helped it surpass Timiș, Brașov, Cluj and Constanța.

Longest selling period was registered, in the case of apartments, in Cluj-Napoca and in Constant, according to Imobiliare.ro data. The dwellings of Timisoara they most quickly found buyers at the beginning of this year.

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Kristina Restea

Kristina Restea is a reporter in the team of the online publication Actualdecluj.ro and has 12 years of experience in the press. She is a graduate of the Faculty of Political, Administrative and Communication Sciences, within the “Babeș-Bolyai” University, Journalism section. Prior to the launch of the actualdecluj.ro project, he wrote for the local newspaper Ziua de Cluj, as a reporter in the Economic department.