SUMMARY
Bucharest is not building enough apartments again yet, but the housing pipeline has finally turned upward after several years of weakening.
The first improvement is small but real. Bucharest-Ilfov completed 17,293 homes in 2025, only 1.9% more than in 2024 and still roughly 21% below the 2021 peak, so the recovery began from a fairly deep hole.
The bigger change is in what may come next. More than 20,500 homes could be delivered across Bucharest and Ilfov in 2026, which would bring annual construction much closer to the previous peak if developers actually hit that number.
Permitting has changed much faster than completions. Authorized residential floor area inside Bucharest jumped to 3.6 times its year-earlier level during the first five months of 2026 even as residential permits weakened across Romania, suggesting the capital has entered a different development cycle from the rest of the country.
This is no longer just a paperwork recovery. Residential construction activity has risen sharply and thousands of units are visibly underway, including roughly 4,000 apartments around Aviației and major pipelines from listed developers such as One United Properties and IMPACT.
The awkward part is timing. Buyers today are still seeing the consequences of the old construction slowdown because recently approved projects need years to become finished apartments; weak current deliveries and a strong future pipeline can therefore coexist for quite a while.
Demand has softened without collapsing. Bucharest transactions recovered from a very weak first quarter to finish the first half only around 2% below a year earlier, while mortgages still finance roughly 58% of residential purchases.
Prices tell us that the market has not yet been flooded with housing. Bucharest asking prices remain roughly 9% higher year-on-year, although the latest fall in new-build asking prices and heavier negotiation in weaker projects suggest sellers are losing some of their pricing power.
The headline supply number also hides two mismatches. Nearly half of Bucharest-Ilfov completions are now in Ilfov, where transport and infrastructure can make homes poor substitutes for apartments inside Bucharest, while a growing share of city development is aimed at buyers who can afford €3,000-€4,000 per square metre.
The most likely outcome is therefore neither a simple shortage nor a citywide glut. Bucharest can remain undersupplied in affordable, well-connected housing while individual premium corridors become crowded with similar projects. The real test is whether annual deliveries can stay above roughly 20,000 for several years and whether more of those homes appear at prices and locations ordinary buyers can actually use.
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Is Bucharest finally building more apartments again?
Yes, Bucharest apartment construction is finally moving upward again, although completed supply is still well below the last peak.
Bucharest-Ilfov finished 17,293 homes in 2025, according to provisional data from Romania’s National Institute of Statistics. That was only 314 more than in 2024, an increase of 1.9%, but the direction stands out. Romania as a whole completed 59,062 homes, down 3.1%, and only Bucharest-Ilfov and the North-East region recorded annual increases.
The longer comparison is less flattering. More than 22,000 homes were completed in Bucharest-Ilfov in 2021, so 2025 output was still roughly 21% below the recent peak. The recovery had barely started by the end of last year.
What makes the picture more interesting is what comes next. SVN Romania estimates that more than 20,500 homes could be completed across Bucharest and Ilfov in 2026, which would be about 18.5% more than in 2025. If developers actually reach that number, annual supply would be getting much closer to the 2021 high.
| Bucharest-Ilfov housing supply | Homes completed / expected | Change | What it shows |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 22,010 | — | Recent peak |
| 2024 | 16,979 | -22.9% vs 2021 | Supply had fallen hard |
| 2025 | 17,293 | +1.9% YoY | First small recovery |
| 2026 SVN estimate | >20,500 | +18.5% YoY | A much stronger rebound if delivered |
Is the jump in Bucharest building permits actually a big deal?
Yes, the recent Bucharest permit rebound is big enough to change the supply outlook, even though many of those apartments will take years to reach buyers.
Colliers calculated that the net residential floor area authorized inside Bucharest during the first five months of 2026 was 3.6 times larger than a year earlier. It was the strongest result of the past five years and came after several years when permitting had become one of the biggest obstacles to new development.
The latest INS numbers make the Bucharest move look even more unusual. Residential building permits across Romania fell 9.6% during the first half of 2026. Bucharest-Ilfov went the other way, issuing 36 more permits than a year earlier. In June alone, Bucharest-Ilfov was one of only two Romanian regions where residential permit numbers increased year-on-year.
Permit counts alone can be misleading because one permit might cover a house while another covers hundreds of apartments. The authorized floor-area increase is more revealing here. Developers are getting approval for much more housing space, which points to larger residential schemes entering the pipeline.
| Permit indicator | Latest change | What we learn |
|---|---|---|
| Bucharest authorized residential floor area, first 5 months | 3.6x YoY | Large projects are returning to the pipeline |
| Romania residential permits, first half | -9.6% | The national market is still weakening |
| Bucharest-Ilfov permits, first half | +36 permits | The capital is moving against the national trend |
| Bucharest-Ilfov permits, June | +12 YoY | Improvement continued beyond Q1 |
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Are those Bucharest permits turning into real construction?
Increasingly, yes. Bucharest’s new housing pipeline is starting to show up on construction sites rather than remaining mostly paperwork.
Colliers found residential construction works rising roughly 16% during the first five months of 2026, faster than the main construction segments it compared. That fits the permit rebound and suggests developers are already putting more capital into active projects.
Specific areas make the change easier to see. SVN counted around 4,000 apartments currently under construction around Aviației, with scheduled completions spread between 2026 and 2028. That is a considerable pipeline for one part of Bucharest and gives us something more concrete than citywide permit statistics.
Large listed developers are building heavily as well. IMPACT reported 970 residential units under construction at the end of June, the biggest active development cycle in the company’s history. One United Properties had several major Bucharest schemes underway and said roughly three quarters of its units under construction were already contracted around mid-year.
Permits, construction volumes and individual project counts are now pointing in the same direction. The comeback has made it onto the building sites.
Why do Bucharest apartment deliveries still look weak today?
Bucharest apartment deliveries still look weak because the apartments being approved and built now belong mostly to the next supply cycle.
The lag is visible in the latest completion numbers. iO Partners counted only about 1,820 homes completed in Bucharest during the first quarter of 2026, down 37% from a year earlier. Ilfov did much better, with around 640 units and a 73% increase, but the combined metropolitan total was still only about 2,460 homes.
Those numbers reflect projects that were permitted, financed and started much earlier, when Bucharest’s development pipeline was shrinking. The recent wave of approvals cannot immediately repair that hole.
Colliers expects projects associated with the current permit recovery to reach the market over roughly the next two to five years. Buyers searching today are therefore still dealing with the previous construction slowdown, even while cranes and approvals become more common again.
| Q1 2026 completions | Homes | YoY change | What buyers see today |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bucharest | ~1,820 | -37% | City deliveries remain weak |
| Ilfov | ~640 | +73% | Suburban construction recovered faster |
| Bucharest + Ilfov | ~2,460 | Mixed | Supply recovery remains uneven |
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Is Bucharest really short of apartments if it already builds so much?
Yes. Bucharest can build far more homes than it did a decade ago and still struggle to produce enough for the market it has today.
Colliers estimates that recent Bucharest-Ilfov residential supply has been more than twice the average recorded during the decade before the pandemic. On its own, that sounds like plenty of construction.
Demand changed just as dramatically. Even after housing transactions weakened in 2025, Bucharest sales remained roughly 28% above their pre-pandemic average according to Colliers. The capital’s housing market has grown too much for its old construction rate to remain a useful benchmark.
The same mismatch explains why a fall from more than 22,000 annual completions to roughly 17,000 was important despite the latter still looking like a large number. Bucharest did not return to the housing market of 2012 or 2015 when construction slowed. Buyers, mortgage volumes, incomes and the metropolitan population footprint had already moved on.
So when we ask whether Bucharest is building “enough,” the relevant comparison is with today’s demand, not with how few apartments the city used to build.
Are Bucharest buyers backing away because apartments got too expensive?
Bucharest buyers became much more cautious, but they have not disappeared.
Apartment transactions started 2026 badly. Colliers found Bucharest sales down heavily during the opening months, yet the city recovered enough to finish the first half only around 2% below the same period of 2025. Romania overall was down roughly 9%.
The monthly path was even more striking. Crosspoint recorded Bucharest transactions falling 16.6% year-on-year in the first quarter, followed by growth of 2.2% in April, almost 16% in May and more than 26% in June.
Financing also remains important. Colliers estimates that mortgages are still used in roughly 58% of residential purchases, about the same share as last year. Buyers have clearly become more price-sensitive, but expensive credit has not pushed mortgage borrowers out of the market.
That demand resilience makes the supply question harder. Bucharest would need far fewer new apartments if high rates were destroying demand permanently. So far, it looks more like postponed and selective demand than mass withdrawal.
| Bucharest transaction trend | YoY change |
|---|---|
| Q1 2026 | -16.6% |
| April | +2.2% |
| May | ~+16% |
| June | >+26% |
| H1 overall | ~-2% |
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If Bucharest is building more, why are apartment prices still rising?
Bucharest is building more, but today’s additional supply has not been large or fast enough to stop apartment prices from rising.
The latest Imobiliare.ro index puts the average asking price across Bucharest at €2,304 per square metre, 9.4% higher than a year earlier. New apartments average €2,549 per square metre, up 9.3%, while older apartments average €2,265, up 9.4%.
There is one fresh sign of cooling worth watching. New-build asking prices fell 2.6% in the latest month, from €2,617 to €2,549 per square metre. One monthly decline cannot establish a new trend, but sellers are no longer pushing prices higher effortlessly everywhere.
Colliers is seeing the same shift at project level. Well-connected and energy-efficient developments are holding up better, while weaker projects increasingly need discounts, negotiations or more generous commercial packages to close sales.
Construction costs are also keeping a floor under new-build prices. Developers are paying more for materials and financing just as buyers become harder to convince. Broad price cuts are difficult in that setup, even when sales slow.
| Bucharest asking prices | Current level | YoY | Latest monthly move |
|---|---|---|---|
| All apartments | €2,304/m² | +9.4% | +0.1% |
| New apartments | €2,549/m² | +9.3% | -2.6% |
| Existing apartments | €2,265/m² | +9.4% | +0.3% |
| New-build premium over existing | €284/m² | — | ~12.5% premium |
Is Ilfov now doing half of Bucharest’s homebuilding?
Almost. Ilfov has become such a large part of the Bucharest housing market that looking only inside the city boundary gives a distorted picture of new supply.
Of the 17,293 homes completed across Bucharest-Ilfov in 2025, around 9,361 were in Bucharest municipality and 7,932 in Ilfov. Ilfov therefore accounted for roughly 46% of metropolitan completions.
The first quarter of 2026 pushed that contrast further. Bucharest completions fell sharply while Ilfov deliveries rose 73% year-on-year. Developers can often assemble larger sites and produce cheaper housing outside the capital, so some of the supply Bucharest needs is naturally moving into places such as Popești-Leordeni and the northern metropolitan corridor.
Still, an apartment outside the ring of established urban neighborhoods is an imperfect replacement for one close to a metro station, major employer or good school. Traffic, transport links and infrastructure determine how much that suburban construction really expands the useful housing supply.
Bucharest can therefore appear reasonably well supplied at the metropolitan level while buyers still face a shortage in specific parts of the city.
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Is Bucharest building the kind of apartments normal buyers actually need?
Not consistently enough, and this may now be a bigger problem than the headline number of apartments being built.
A lot of current development is happening either outside central Bucharest or higher up the price range. Crosspoint has said that middle-high and premium schemes represent roughly 80% of its residential consultancy portfolio. One United Properties reported an average contracted price of €3,853 per square metre in the first half of 2026, far above the roughly €2,550 asking average for new Bucharest apartments.
Aviației gives another useful example. SVN estimates roughly 4,000 apartments are under construction there, but the average price for units in development is around €3,230 per usable square metre before VAT. A one-bedroom apartment starts around €158,000 plus VAT and a two-bedroom around €214,000 plus VAT.
That is real new supply, but much of it serves households with above-average incomes. A city can add thousands of apartments and still leave a shortage around the price point where ordinary first-time buyers and young families are actually searching.
Location creates the same mismatch. A large project in peripheral Ilfov can increase metropolitan supply without doing much for someone who needs to reach Pipera, Victoriei or the city centre every day. Counting units alone hides both problems.
Could weaker demand solve Bucharest’s apartment shortage by itself?
Probably not. Bucharest housing demand is being held back by affordability, but there is still plenty of interest behind the weaker transaction numbers.
A Colliers survey of 1,000 urban respondents found that 42.5% expected to buy a home within six to twelve months, up from 35.2% a year earlier. We should not read that literally as four people out of ten actually completing a purchase; stated intentions are always much higher than real transactions. The direction is still useful.
The same survey found urban home ownership falling from 73% to 70.5%, while renting increased from 11.3% to 15.9%. Romania also continues to have one of the EU’s highest overcrowding rates. These figures point to households that still want different or additional housing even when high prices and mortgage costs delay the purchase.
Bucharest sales recovering during the first half strengthens that interpretation. Demand bent when financing and household budgets got worse, then picked up again without mortgage conditions becoming dramatically easier.
For developers, that creates an awkward market. Buyers are difficult to convert, yet the underlying need for housing has not gone away. If borrowing costs eventually ease, part of the demand being postponed can return before today’s newly permitted projects are finished.
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Could Bucharest actually end up overbuilding apartments?
Yes, some parts of Bucharest could become overbuilt over the next few years, even if the wider city still needs more housing.
The risk is easiest to see where construction is concentrated. Around 4,000 apartments are already underway in Aviației alone. Other large projects are moving through the pipeline in the north, west and metropolitan fringe. If several schemes aimed at similar buyers complete at the same time, developers can end up competing heavily inside one small submarket.
Price segment matters as much as geography. A cluster of €3,000-€4,000-per-square-metre projects can accumulate unsold units while cheaper housing remains scarce elsewhere. That would look like oversupply to those developers without meaning Bucharest as a whole had solved its housing problem.
The latest market behavior already hints at this divergence. Colliers says buyers are negotiating more aggressively in weaker projects, while well-located, efficient developments continue to perform better. The gap between good and mediocre projects is widening.
The next Bucharest housing problem may therefore become more local: too many expensive apartments in a few development corridors and too few affordable homes in the places where demand remains strongest.
What could stop Bucharest’s construction comeback?
High financing costs, weaker affordability and projects aimed at the wrong buyers could still stop part of Bucharest’s new pipeline from being completed.
Romania’s central bank rate remains high, and Colliers expects meaningful monetary easing to take longer than developers hoped earlier in the year. Around 58% of home purchases still involve mortgages, so financing costs directly limit how much buyers can pay.
Developers face pressure on their side too. Construction materials have become more expensive again, and companies are planning projects over longer periods because they are less certain what buyers will be able to afford two or three years from now.
The fiscal environment has added another layer. Changes to housing VAT already distorted transaction timing, while an extension for some buyers eligible for the old reduced rate has pushed part of that effect further into the year. Monthly transaction figures around those deadlines deserve a bit of caution.
Bucharest’s authorized residential floor area has risen extremely quickly. The next test is conversion. If projects lose financing, presales disappoint or developers discover that their pricing is unrealistic, part of that approved floor area will arrive later than planned or never be built in its original form.
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So, is Bucharest building enough apartments again?
Not yet, but Bucharest has moved from a shrinking housing pipeline to a genuine construction recovery, and that is the clearest improvement we have seen in several years.
The evidence has shifted noticeably. Completed homes across Bucharest-Ilfov finally increased in 2025. SVN now sees the potential for more than 20,500 completions this year. Residential construction work is growing quickly. Developers have thousands of units visibly underway, including roughly 4,000 around Aviației alone. Bucharest-Ilfov is also issuing more residential permits while permits are falling sharply across Romania.
At the same time, buyers are giving us very little evidence that Bucharest already has enough homes. First-half apartment sales recovered to only about 2% below last year. Asking prices remain roughly 9% higher year-on-year. Good projects continue to sell, mortgages still finance a large share of transactions, and affordable well-connected housing remains difficult to replace with expensive apartments or distant suburban supply.
Our answer would become much more positive if annual deliveries settle above 20,000 for several years rather than briefly touching that level. The mix would also need to improve. Another wave of expensive northern projects will add supply without fixing the shortage faced by middle-income households.
For now, Bucharest is building enough to start repairing the supply problem. It is not building enough to say the problem has been repaired.
OUR METHODOLOGY
This analysis tests whether Bucharest is once again building enough apartments for the housing market it has today. There is no single number that can answer that, so we compare completed supply with permits, construction activity, the future development pipeline, transactions, prices, financing conditions, geography and the type of housing being produced.
We separate the stages of the housing pipeline rather than treating them as interchangeable. A permit shows future development capacity, active construction shows that projects are progressing, and a completed home is actual new supply. This distinction is especially important in Bucharest because the recent permit recovery will take several years to feed fully into deliveries.
For completed housing and permits, we prioritize official data from Romania’s National Institute of Statistics. We use both Bucharest-Ilfov metropolitan totals and separate Bucharest and Ilfov figures where the administrative boundary would otherwise hide meaningful differences in where new homes are actually being built.
Forward-looking estimates are kept separate from completed supply. SVN Romania’s estimate of more than 20,500 potential Bucharest-Ilfov completions in 2026 is therefore treated as a pipeline forecast, not as housing that has already reached the market.
We use Colliers research to connect permitting with construction activity, transactions, mortgage usage, affordability and the expected two-to-five-year lag between recently approved projects and completed homes. Crosspoint is used as an additional check on the sharp change in Bucharest transaction momentum during the first half of 2026.
Asking-price data come from the Imobiliare.ro index. We use asking prices to measure seller expectations and market direction, while keeping them separate from signed transaction prices. Project-level information from One United Properties and IMPACT helps verify that the construction recovery is visible in active development pipelines rather than only in aggregate statistics.
We also distinguish total housing supply from useful housing supply. Ilfov construction can relieve the wider metropolitan market, but it is not always a close substitute for an apartment inside Bucharest because commuting, metro access, schools and infrastructure vary sharply. The same principle applies to price: an expensive premium apartment increases the unit count without necessarily solving the shortage faced by a middle-income buyer.
We do not assign Bucharest a theoretical equilibrium number or assume that returning to an old construction average means the market is adequately supplied. Historical completions are useful benchmarks, but current demand, prices, mortgage activity, affordability and the geographic distribution of projects carry more weight in the final judgment.
Key sources used for this analysis include Romania’s National Institute of Statistics housing database, INSSE residential building-permit data, Colliers on Bucharest’s residential-market recovery, Colliers’ H1 residential outlook, Colliers and Unlock Market Research on buyer intentions and affordability, SVN Romania’s residential research, Ziarul Financiar on SVN’s 2026 delivery forecast, Crosspoint on first-half transaction recovery, iO Partners’ Bucharest residential research, Imobiliare.ro’s Bucharest asking-price index, One United Properties’ H1 2026 trading update, IMPACT’s H1 2026 results, Eurostat’s Housing in Europe 2025, and ANAF material on the transitional reduced housing VAT regime.
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