Is it finally safe to buy off-plan in Bucharest?

See what went wrong for property buyers in Bucharest

Why did buying off-plan in Bucharest become so risky?

Buying an off-plan apartment in Bucharest became hard to trust because the Nordis collapse showed how much money buyers could hand over while still having surprisingly weak control over the apartment they thought they had secured.

The size of the failure explains why Romania eventually changed the rules. CITR, the judicial administrator of Nordis Management, reported that advances from apartment buyers represented roughly 81% of the company's RON 449 million of liabilities. More than RON 354 million was accepted in claims from 816 individuals and companies that had paid advances.

That comes to roughly RON 434,000 per accepted advance-paying creditor on average, although individual exposures varied widely. For many buyers, this had gone far beyond losing a small reservation deposit. They were effectively financing construction with sums large enough to change their personal finances.

DIICOT separately alleged that the Nordis group collected more than RON 957 million, around €195 million, from customers between 2019 and 2024. Prosecutors have alleged that money was diverted, that some units were involved in overlapping transactions and that buyers were misled about parts of the projects. Those criminal allegations still have to be determined through the legal process.

CITR later went through roughly 3,000 contractual files, cadastral records and court information around the Mamaia project and identified 212 ongoing agreements where the originally promised unit was no longer available to the buyer, including cases involving multiple promises or later sales.

The lesson for Bucharest buyers was brutal: people were putting lender-sized amounts of money into unfinished developments without lender-sized protection.

What went wrong	Evidence from Nordis	What buyers were exposed to	Weakness revealed
Heavy dependence on buyer money	About 81% of RON 449m liabilities came from apartment advances	Buyers were directly financing construction	Very high developer counterparty risk
Large individual exposure	RON 354m+ across 816 accepted advance claims	Losses could reach tens of thousands of euros	Reservation risk had become investment-sized
Conflicting unit rights	212 ongoing agreements later identified without their original unit	A buyer could lose the apartment attached to the promise	Poor unit-level visibility
Very large customer cash pool	About €195m collected, according to DIICOT	Money could allegedly move beyond the expected project purpose	Weak control over cash
Insolvency	Nordis Management entered insolvency	Buyers had to fight through insolvency proceedings	A promise gave far less certainty than ownership

Did Romania actually fix the biggest off-plan loopholes?

Yes. Romania's new off-plan rules close several of the exact loopholes that made the old Bucharest model unusually dangerous.

Law 207/2025 changed when and how a developer can make a serious promise to sell a future apartment. The construction authorization must first be recorded in the land book. For a future condominium, the project then goes through pre-apartmentation and individual land-book records are opened for the future apartments.

The sale promise itself has to be signed in authentic form before a notary. The notary then requests registration of that promise in the land book on the same day or by the next working day.

That gives the future apartment a much clearer legal identity before a buyer starts putting substantial money into it.

The cadastral reform goes further. Each future unit can now be tracked through the construction phase and later carried into the final cadastral records once the building is completed and formally received.

A buyer should now be able to identify the actual future apartment, see its legal record and see a registered promise attached to it. That is a much cleaner starting point than relying on whatever sits in a developer's internal sales system.

Buying stage	Old practical weakness	Current requirement	What improves
Project preparation	Future apartment could remain loosely defined	Construction authorization recorded	Project becomes traceable
Future apartment	Separate legal identity could be missing	Future-unit land book created	Specific apartment becomes identifiable
Sale promise	Private agreements could carry major exposure	Authentic notarized form required	Independent legal checkpoint
After signing	Promise could remain difficult for outsiders to see	Notary requests registration immediately	Existing buyer right becomes visible
Completion	Legal continuity could be messy	Future records roll into definitive apartment records	Buyer position follows the unit

Can a Bucharest developer still promise the same apartment twice?

It has become much harder for a compliant Bucharest developer to promise the same future apartment to several buyers without the conflict showing up.

The reason is the new unit-level registration system. A future apartment receives an identifiable cadastral record, and the notarized sale promise is entered against that record.

A later buyer is therefore dealing with a property that already has a legal history rather than simply relying on a private spreadsheet inside the developer's sales office.

This does not make deliberate fraud impossible. Someone willing to forge documents or ignore the law can still try to cheat. The ordinary legal route is far less forgiving, though: duplicate promises are much harder to hide when each future unit has its own land-book trail.

CITR's review of the Nordis Mamaia project showed why this matters, with 212 ongoing agreements where buyers no longer had the originally promised unit available to them.

If a Bucharest sales team cannot show the legal identity of the future apartment and explain how the promise will be registered against it, we would walk away.

Does Romania's 5% rule mean only 5% of your money is at risk?

No. The 5% rule protects the reservation stage of a Romanian off-plan purchase, while a buyer can still commit considerably more money after signing the notarized sale promise.

This distinction gets lost surprisingly often.

A reservation agreement can last for a maximum of 60 days and the developer cannot collect more than 5% of the apartment price under that reservation. If the transaction fails to move forward because of the developer's exclusive fault, the reservation amount must be returned within 30 days.

That is a useful protection. A developer can no longer use a simple reservation form as an excuse to collect something resembling half the purchase price.

The rules change once the authentic sale promise is signed. Later advances have to enter a separate bank account dedicated to the project, and the law controls how that money can be spent. For the structural stage, the permitted use can correspond to a maximum of 25% of the price. After the structure is finished, another amount corresponding to up to 20% can be used for installations.

So someone buying a €180,000 apartment should never hear “the law caps advances at 5%” and assume only €9,000 can be exposed before completion. The reservation cap and the later advance regime are two different things.

Payment stage	Current protection	What buyers should understand
Reservation	Maximum 5% of purchase price	Initial commitment is tightly limited
Reservation period	Maximum 60 days	Buyer cannot be left indefinitely in reservation limbo
Notarized promise	Further advances can be paid	Total pre-completion exposure can exceed 5%
Structural stage	Use of project funds capped according to statutory limits	Buyer money can finance actual construction
Installation stage	Further controlled use after structure completion	More buyer capital can enter before handover
Final payment	Depends on contract and financing structure	Keeping more money until late construction remains safer

Is the new project account basically escrow?

No. Romania's project-specific account makes it harder to misuse buyer advances, but the money can still be spent while the apartment is being built.

Under Law 207/2025, advances paid under the notarized promise must go into a separate account dedicated to that particular development. The developer can use the money only for the project and needs the required approval from the responsible construction-site professional for the spending covered by the law.

Using those funds for other purposes can bring a fine equal to 1% of the developer's previous-year turnover, assuming the conduct does not amount to a criminal offence.

This closes an obvious weakness exposed by developer failures: money raised from one group of homebuyers should not casually disappear into unrelated projects or group expenses.

But the buyer's cash is meant to fund construction.

Imagine we pay €40,000 and the developer correctly uses that €40,000 for concrete, labour and installations. Six months later, the company runs out of liquidity. The legal rules may have worked exactly as intended, yet our €40,000 is already embedded in a half-finished building.

So the reform cuts cash-diversion risk a lot. It does much less to solve the old-fashioned problem of a developer simply running out of money before handover.

What happens to your Bucharest apartment if the developer goes bankrupt?

A registered off-plan promise gives a Bucharest buyer a much stronger position in insolvency than an invisible private agreement, but bankruptcy can still leave the buyer waiting for an unfinished apartment or trying to recover money.

Romanian insolvency law has a route through which a buyer can ask the judicial administrator or liquidator to complete a pre-insolvency property sale promise. For real estate, having the promise registered in the land book is one of the important conditions.

The new regime therefore improves a buyer's position exactly where older deals could be weak.

Still, registration alone does not settle the whole insolvency. The legal analysis can involve whether the agreed price has been paid or can still be paid, whether the buyer already possesses the property, whether the price meets the required value conditions, whether the asset is important to a reorganization and what rights earlier secured creditors have.

The physical state of the building can be even more important than the legal wording. A completed apartment with a clear path to transfer is one problem. A concrete shell requiring several million euros of extra construction is a completely different one.

Nordis gave us a real example. CITR has repeatedly treated project completion as central to recovering value for buyers and creditors because completing apartments can turn claims for money into actual deliverable properties.

Can mortgages, contract terms and due diligence still catch you out?

Yes. A registered Bucharest off-plan apartment is much easier to investigate today, but the mortgage structure, contract and developer still need to be checked properly before signing.

Start with financing. Development land is often mortgaged, and that by itself does not make a project bad. Bank financing can actually be reassuring if a credible lender has reviewed the development and the developer is putting in meaningful equity.

What we need to know is how the mortgage affects our exact apartment. Which lender has security over the land or project? What has to happen before that security is released from our unit? Is there a standard release mechanism when the final price is paid?

Then check the future apartment's land-book record. It should be possible to identify the unit through the current cadastral system and see the relevant construction authorization, registered rights and encumbrances.

The contract deserves the same attention. Romania's current cadastral rules allow certain changes to the development before final apartmentation. Buyer consent receives specific protection if the total surface or location of the promised unit changes, while the wider project can still evolve within the legal and contractual framework.

That leaves room for disputes over common areas, later phases, parking, landscaping, commercial spaces, specifications and substituted materials.

A proper off-plan promise should make the completion deadline, permitted delays, usable area, finish schedule, parking or storage rights, VAT treatment, penalties, financing conditions and refund rights easy to understand.

We would also follow the money. The company receiving our advance should make sense within the project structure, and payments under the notarized promise should follow the project-account rules.

Finally, check the developer's history and current construction. Visit earlier phases, speak with actual owners, look at permanent utilities and common areas, check whether previous titles arrived on time and search the legal entities behind the project.

If the sales brochure promises a landscaped courtyard and the contract gives the developer broad freedom to redesign the common areas, the contract is the document we would believe.

Are Bucharest developers behaving better now?

Romania has imposed much better off-plan rules, but recent enforcement shows that buyers still cannot assume every developer follows consumer law properly.

ANPC's national inspection campaign checked 491 real-estate operators and found deviations at 216 of them.

That is about 44% of the companies inspected.

The problems included apartments below statutory minimum useful areas, incomplete or unclear consumer information and weaknesses around contractual and legal-warranty disclosures. Inspectors issued 166 fines, 144 warnings and stopped 3,055 non-compliant residential units from being sold until the problems were addressed.

We should be careful with the 44% figure. ANPC enforcement inspections are not a randomized census proving that 44% of all Romanian developers are bad. The violations also ranged in seriousness.

Even with those caveats, the result is too large to dismiss.

ANPC has also focused on contract clauses that can leave purchasers carrying too much risk, including unilateral completion extensions, unclear withdrawal rights, weak warranty disclosures and situations where a developer may try to keep large amounts already paid after buyer default.

ANPC finding	Reported result	What we take from it
Developers/operators inspected	491	Broad enforcement campaign
Operators with identified deviations	216	About 44% of those checked
Fines	166	Many issues went beyond informal guidance
Warnings	144	Compliance problems covered a wide range
Value of fines	More than RON 979,200	Enforcement had financial consequences
Homes stopped from sale	3,055	Some defects affected the units being marketed

Is Bucharest finally building enough homes to make off-plan projects less risky?

Bucharest's construction pipeline is waking up quickly, but we are still too early to call the city's old supply and permitting problems solved.

The latest construction data are much stronger than the figures buyers had become used to.

Colliers found that the net residential floor area authorized in Bucharest during the first five months of 2026 was 3.6 times the level recorded a year earlier, the fastest increase in five years. Residential construction works across Romania were also up about 16% over the same period.

That is a clear change in direction.

The starting point was weak, though. Around 59,000 homes were completed nationally in 2025, the lowest number since 2017. In Bucharest-Ilfov, Crosspoint counted 17,293 new-home completions in 2025 and only 4,013 residential building permits, leaving the capital with one of its thinnest development pipelines in years.

Permits issued today also take time to become apartments. Colliers estimates that the impact of Bucharest's permit rebound will show up over roughly the next two to five years rather than suddenly filling the market.

For an off-plan buyer, the practical point is simple: an already authorized project with visible work on site is still much easier to trust than a scheme depending on future planning approvals.

Is there still enough of a discount to make buying off-plan worthwhile?

Sometimes. Bucharest's new-build prices are high enough today that a genuine early-stage discount can be valuable, but we would want more than a token saving for taking construction risk.

The latest Imobiliare.ro index puts asking prices for new Bucharest apartments at roughly €2,549 per square metre. That is about 9.3% higher than a year earlier and 27% above the level two years earlier.

There is some cooling inside that strong longer trend. The latest monthly reading fell around 2.6%.

Those numbers are useful together. New Bucharest housing has repriced dramatically over two years, while the market today is no longer rising in a perfectly straight line.

Supply remains tight as well. In the first half of 2026, the stock of new apartments offered for sale continued to decline, while Colliers found Bucharest apartment transactions were only around 2% below the previous year after a much weaker start.

So a good developer does not necessarily have to offer a huge launch discount.

We would judge the discount against a comparable finished apartment, in the same micro-location and after VAT, parking, storage and upgrades.

Saving €15,000 on a €150,000 comparable property is meaningful. Saving €3,000 while wiring a large advance and waiting two years is much harder to defend.

Comparable finished price	Off-plan price	Discount	Our view
€153,000	€150,000	2.0%	Too little for most buyers
€160,000	€150,000	6.3%	Interesting only with a strong project
€167,000	€150,000	10.2%	Real compensation for taking some risk
€180,000	€150,000	16.7%	Attractive enough to investigate closely

Does 21% VAT make a new Bucharest off-plan apartment much less attractive?

Yes. A buyer signing a fresh Bucharest off-plan deal now generally has to price the apartment around the 21% standard VAT rate, which makes the final cost much harder to hide behind an attractive developer headline price.

There is one important current exception.

Romania recently extended the old 9% transitional VAT window for certain buyers who had already entered qualifying precontracts before the tax change. The extension was introduced after disruption to the ANCPI cadastral systems prevented some eligible transactions from closing on time.

That relief belongs to legacy contracts meeting the statutory conditions. Someone walking into a Bucharest sales office today and signing a new off-plan agreement should not assume they can qualify for the old 9% treatment.

The difference is large.

Take a net apartment price of €125,000. Adding 9% produces €136,250. Adding 21% produces €151,250.

The gap is €15,000.

That can wipe out an apparently generous construction-stage discount.

We would therefore compare the final amount payable today, including VAT, parking, storage, mandatory upgrades and transaction costs.

Should you pay a huge advance for a cheaper Bucharest apartment?

Usually no. A large early advance can buy a better price, but it also turns the homebuyer into a cheap source of construction finance for the developer.

That trade can still make sense at the right price. It simply needs to be priced like a financing decision.

Suppose the same apartment costs €150,000 with a modest payment schedule and €137,000 if we put down a very large amount at the start. Saving €13,000 is substantial.

Perhaps €60,000 or €80,000 of our own cash will sit economically inside an unfinished project for 18 or 24 months. We carry the developer's completion risk, lose access to that money and may have fewer options if our own circumstances change.

A bank lending €80,000 to the same development would look at the land, construction budget, permits, developer equity, presales, contractor, cost overruns and repayment plan before sending the money.

The new ring-fencing rules make a large advance cleaner and safer than it used to be. They do not make a weak developer financially strong.

For most buyers, paying less before completion is still worth more than squeezing out the last few percent of discount.

Can you tell whether a Bucharest developer is actually safe?

Yes, to a degree. The strongest Bucharest off-plan projects leave a visible trail of completed buildings, functioning financing, real construction progress and buyers who actually received what they paid for.

A big brand name by itself tells us very little.

We would start with previous projects from the same developer or economic group. How many comparable residential buildings have actually reached handover? Were utilities permanent at delivery? Were titles registered without long delays? Did the final useful areas and specifications match what buyers were sold?

Then we would look at the current project's money.

A development backed by meaningful developer equity and committed bank financing is much easier to trust than one that appears to need constant presales to keep contractors working.

Construction progress gives us another check. A building with its structure well advanced tells us much more than a showroom, a fenced plot and a render.

Finally, we would search the actual project companies rather than only the consumer brand. Repeated court disputes, insolvency issues, unexplained transfers between related companies or constant creation of thinly capitalized entities deserve attention.

What we check	Stronger project	More worrying project
Delivery history	Several comparable schemes completed	Mostly launches and future plans
Financing	Bank funding plus developer equity	Heavy dependence on customer advances
Current works	Construction visibly progressing	Mostly renders and marketing
Company structure	Clear ownership and project entity	Confusing related-party structure
Previous handovers	Titles, utilities and apartments delivered	Recurring delays or unresolved defects
Buyer experience	Verifiable owners in completed phases	Mainly promotional testimonials

When does an off-plan apartment in Bucharest become reasonably safe?

For an ordinary buyer, the sweet spot is usually after the legal structure is complete and construction has moved far enough that we can see real progress, while some off-plan discount still remains.

Buying at the earliest possible moment gives the largest theoretical upside and the largest pile of unknowns.

Once the project has its authorization, future-unit land books and a registrable notarized promise, a large chunk of the old legal risk falls away.

Once foundations and the structural frame are visibly advanced, we can also verify that serious capital has already gone into the site.

Later, when the building is enclosed and installations are underway, the chance of complete non-delivery generally falls again. The discount tends to shrink as that happens.

By the time reception, permanent utilities and final apartmentation are close, the purchase starts to resemble a finished-home transaction much more closely.

For most non-professional buyers today, we think the best balance sits somewhere after construction has clearly started rather than at the launch party.

Project stage	Legal risk	Completion risk	Likely price advantage	Our view
Before proper authorization	Very high	Very high	Potentially large	Avoid
Authorized + future unit registered	Much lower	High	Often attractive	Strong developers only
Structure clearly underway	Lower	Medium	Usually still meaningful	Best overall trade-off
Enclosed + installations underway	Low-moderate	Lower	Smaller	Good for cautious buyers
Reception approaching	Low	Low	Limited	Very defensible
Finished + registered	Lowest	Lowest	Usually minimal	Conventional purchase

So, is it finally safe to buy off-plan in Bucharest?

Partly yes. A carefully chosen off-plan apartment in Bucharest is now defensible in a way it often was not before, but buying purely because a famous developer has a nice showroom is still a bad idea.

Romania has closed several of the most dangerous gaps exposed by Nordis.

The future apartment now gets a clearer cadastral identity. Serious sale promises have to be notarized and registered. Reservations are limited to 5% for a maximum of 60 days. Later advances have to move through a project-specific account and their use is restricted.

Those changes materially reduce duplicate-sale risk, hidden-contract risk and the freedom developers once had over buyer money.

The remaining danger is easier to understand now: can this specific developer actually finish this specific building?

If construction costs jump, the contractor stops work, sales dry up or the developer becomes insolvent, buyers can still spend months or years dealing with an unfinished project. Recent ANPC enforcement also makes it difficult to argue that compliance problems have disappeared from Romanian residential development.

At the same time, the financial reason to buy early remains real. Bucharest's latest new-apartment asking price is around €2,549/m², roughly 9% above a year ago and 27% higher over two years. Completed new supply is still tight even as the future permit pipeline improves.

Our threshold is much higher than “the project is legal.”

We would buy today when the future unit is properly registered, the promise will be notarized and recorded, the developer has repeatedly delivered comparable buildings, construction is preferably already visible, funding does not appear excessively dependent on customer cash, the contract gives the buyer meaningful protection and the discount over a comparable completed apartment is large enough to pay us for waiting.

We would avoid deals built around huge advance discounts, vague delivery dates, confusing mortgage releases, weak developer funding or pressure to transfer money before the statutory structure is in place.

Off-plan Bucharest is investable again for a careful buyer. It still deserves more due diligence than a finished apartment, and anyone treating the new law as a government guarantee is taking more risk than they realize.

Who is the author of this content?

INVESTROPA

A team researching how property purchases actually go wrong across Europe

We are a team of real estate researchers and local specialists focused on helping people avoid expensive mistakes when buying property abroad, particularly in Bucharest. If you’d like to learn more about us, you can check our presentation page.