“The Polish, especially under the Kaczynski brothers, rooted out corruption, so the Polish market is safer, investors are more comfortable and this also leads to economic growth. Romania is perhaps more attractive because you still have homework to do,” Bauer told ZF in an interview.
He says the company would not have had as many problems with the city hall in Poland as it did in Bucharest and notes that a lot of civil servants in Romania seem to be “having a good time” causing problems.
The Austrian company recently finalized the renovation of a historic building constructed in 1936 on Magheru boulevard in central Bucharest, a project that entailed a total investment of EUR20 million. The cost included the acquisition of the building, the consolidation of the foundation and of the entire structural frame.
Bauer recalls his first visit to Romania in 1990 shortly after the Romanian revolution, when he was told that the Intercontinental hotel in central Bucharest was up for sale.
He then came to Bucharest, talked to a businessman who showed him a pile of documents, but could not prove that he was the owner of the hotel. In 1991 he was interested in several investments in the Romanian port of Constanta, but it was then that the “mineriad” (a violent miner intervention) started, so he decided to use the group’s available funds on other markets.
Later things on the local market started to change and Alfred Michael Beck, another shareholder of S+B Gruppe, bought around 700 hectares of farmland in Oltenia (southern Romania) and started investments in wine growing, while in real estate S+B bought several properties in Bucharest and across Romania – the first two finalized projects are office buildings Pipera Business Tower and Magheru One.
“A lot has changed here in the past 20 years. In the ’90s Romanians were shier, less willing to communicate. It’s true that we didn’t understand the local specificity very well, either. Now Romanians have travelled a lot, they speak foreign languages, are open, there are a lot more restaurants in Bucharest and of course cars on the streets are very different from what they used to be,” Bauer also says.
S+B Gruppe is a business controlled by Schertier and Beck families, an entrepreneurial business, which partnered with Immofinanz to enter the Romanian market, with a view to developing several commercial projects.
In a surprise move, at the end of 2008, when Immofinanz had started an extensive restructuring program, S+B decided to buy the stakes held by Immofinanz in joint projects and kept them in its portfolio. (five plots for shopping centers and two plots for office projects in Pipera – Pipera Business Tower – and close to Bucharest’s airport.
In fact, after completion of the Magheru building, the first investment of the S+B Group on the Romanian market could target the 4-hectare plot near Otopeni airport, where the company plans to develop an office building and a hotel.
(English version by Daniela Stoican)