In the last 5-6 years, the share of buyers with budgets of over EUR100,000 fell sharply, to 18% of the total. Currently, around 21% of the clients have budgets between EUR60,000-80,000, while 13% of the clients would afford a home worth EUR80,000-100,000.
In 2008, most of the buyers were looking for expensive homes, given that prices for new and old two-room and three-room apartments in Bucharest usually exceeded EUR100,000. Nearly 9% of the clients had budgets between EUR80,000 and EUR100,000, 10% of the clients had between EUR60,000-80,000 to buy a home, while 11% would have paid up to EUR60,000 to buy an apartment.
To meet the new price demands, real estate developers had to reconfigure their products both in terms of the number of rooms and in terms of size.
Thus, three-room apartments accounted for 37.9% of the total apartments built between 2000-2008, followed by two-room apartments (33.6%), four-room and plus four-room apartments (15.3%) and one-room apartments (13.2%).
Between 2012 and 2016, developers focused on building two-room apartments (48.3%), followed by three-room apartments (32.5%), studios (12.2%) four-room and plus four-room apartments (7%).
Besides building apartments with less rooms, developers also reduced apartment sizes. Thus, the average size of a studio fell from 45 square meters (2000-2008) to 36 square meters (2012-2016), a two-room apartment has now 55 square meters, compared with 74 square meters, a three-room apartment has 82 square meters, compared with 105 square meters, while a four-room apartment has 115 sqm, from 125 sqm in 2000-2008.
The government-backed mortgage lending First Home program had a major impact on the development of the real estate market, as the number of real estate transactions rose since the launch of the program back in June 2009, which unquestionably reduced the price fall pace.