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Romania's farm land is seven times cheaper than that of most European nations. Yet investors do regard the country as an El Dorado of farming opportunities, given that individual land plots are very small.
Romania's farm land is seven times cheaper than that of most European nations. Yet investors do regard the country as an El Dorado of farming opportunities, given that individual land plots are very small. The only sought for plots of land are those located in the vicinity of big cities, in the expectation they would be reassigned from agricultural purpose to city planning, and thus real-estate development.
The total acreage of farm land foreigners bought is about 300,000 hectares, or 3.5% of Romania's farm land, according to Adrian Radulescu, an adviser in the Ministry of Agriculture.
Current prices for one hectare of farm land in Romania stay at between 1,000 and 3,500 euros, while European Union prices go at between 7,000 to 10,000 euros.
"The most expensive farm land is the one having vineyard planted on it; one hectare sells for 10,000 euros in Italy, 3,000 to 3,500 euros in Romania," said Liviu Ureche, president of the Sato Imobiliar real-estate agency.
Foreign investors from Austria, Israel, Italy, Greece or Spain, willing to use agricultural land for farming purposes target plots of at least 250 to 300 hectares in size. Unfortunately the property structure in Romania makes for such plots to come hard by. “We just had clients from Israel asking for plots of 500 to 600 hectares on which they want to grow grapefruit trees. We recommended them the Dobrogea region, for climate reasons, but it would be very hard to satisfy their demand,” said Cornel Farcuta, manager of the EuroMetropola real-estate company.
Aggregating together small plots to build larger properties is time consuming. “We had one recent example of spending one year to build up a 300 hectares property, as we had to deal with 500 different owners. Some had plots from five to 20 hectares big, but most of the properties were one to two hectares big,” explained Ureche.
Romania has some 9.4 million hectares of arable land, of which 500,000 hectares are covered with vineyards and fruit trees. However, data from the Ministry of Agriculture shows that only some 6 million hectares are actually being farmed on.
The trend stays, however, for the real-estate companies to go into speculative deals, meaning that they go for the farm land around cities, which then they sell at tens of times the buying price to developers.
• Translated by Anca Păduraru
