Work on the project called Moara Corbeanca began in mid October, with the opening scheduled for April 2015.
“I moved to Corbeanca in 2000 and noticed that about half of the 8,000 inhabitants were people who had left Bucharest to leave closer to nature. Transylvania has community centers, places for trade and socialization usually built around town halls and churches but the south of the country does not have such centers,” Emilian Radu told ZF.
“This is where we got the idea for the project.”
The partners in the project contribute about RON3.3 million, an almost 4,000 plot of land and a EUR800,000 loan taken out from Banca Transilvania.
There are two supermarkets of Belgian-held Mega Image group in Corbeanca, one of them on a plot of land near the Moara Corbeanca that Emilian Radu sold. The four consultants want to build a complementary shopping center and have commissioned Italian architect Domenico Del Piore, who designed the cinema in the Baneasa Shopping City, to design it.
“We’ve got letters of intent for almost 50% of the spaces, such as the pharmacy, the restaurant, the coffee shop, the wine shop and the dry cleaning store. We are hammering the standard lease together with TBD (the advisory firm of Ali Ergun Ergen, former head of Baneasa Developments and Anchor Grup).”
The developer of the project is Moara Corbeanca Commercial Center, whose owners are Emilian Radu (42.75%), who left PwC in 2009, Vasile Iuga (30.53%), country managing partner of PwC, Radu Stoicoviciu (15.27%) partner, head of advisory services of PwC, and Mihaela Mitroi (11.45%), partner, tax and legal services at PwC.
“The demand (…) in Corbeanca is not very visible because people spend a lot of time in their cars. The information we have about the sales of the two Mega Image supermarkets gives us a better picture of the potential. If we had half the sales per square meter of Mega Image and we charged 10% of sales as rent, we would easily get back our investment in seven years.”
At a 100% take-up, Moara Corbeanca should charge EUR15/square meter rent on average per month to attain yearly revenue of EUR300,000.
Emilian Radu bought about 15,000 square meters of land in Corbeanca in early 2000s, when population in the rural town was about 3,000 people and believes such projects can be replicated in other small towns where the purchasing power is higher than the national average.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)