Real estate market recovery?
World analysts expect that this year the market will finally touch the bottom, but this is not that bad … Why? Cause this means that next year the recovery starts!
The growth of the real estate market in whole of Europe is expected to start next year, everywhere except in Eastern Europe. Does this mean that Croatia will continue the negative trend in the market? Yes and no. Although Croatia is among the critical countries, our market is still on a some sort of border between East and West from an economic point of view. This means that, depending on the sector of the market, recovery can be expected during the 2011 and 2012.
Investors in Croatia will have to be reconciled with lower rates of return on investments, and banks can expect to have to finance projects through some other models. Large residential projects can be expected in 2012, and the same goes for new shopping centers and office buildings. Further stabilization of prices will also help the recovery of real estate market in Croatia, but that does not mean that all existing apartments will automatically be sold. Regarding industrial property, the situation is quite uncertain and new investments can not be predicted. Tourism should be successful as usually, but here there are also various, mostly legal issues.
In the end, optimism comes from neighboring Slovenia. Apartments market in the first three months grew by over 70 percent! Unfortunately, this trend is not followed by houses.

World property market began to slowly recover as the 2009 approached the end, although still showing signs of instability. The report was prepared by the Global Property Guide based on data from 27 countries. The last quarter of 2009 brought growth in real estate prices in 16 countries, while a further 11 recorded a fall, but still yearly price growth was recorded only in 10 countries. This shows that the market is still in crisis.
Real estate market in Croatia will be resting in 2010 too. Majority of real estate agencies in Croatia will try to forget 2009 as soon as possible.
Real estate prices are down 7 percent and after negotiations they can drop up to 20 percent. However, it is expected that even lower prices are possible only for low-quality real estate. Furthermore, crisis and recession have extinguished more than 40 percent of Croatian real estate agencies.
Croatian courts have a difficult task of selling a large number of houses, flats and small apartment buildings whose owners have failed to meet their obligations to banks.
What will be necessary to make the Croatian real estate market finally free of this crisis? It appears that all the efforts of local banks and the state have so far not led to a significant shift for the better and to make matters worse there has been no significant fall in prices. In such circumstances it is difficult to sell a property, as evidenced by the increasing number of cancellation of agencies and many agency employees losing their job.