Stable commercial real estate market
During the past couple of years business offices were being built all over the place, with even more of them announced before the crisis. Then the recession came and all plans were put on hold.
All investors should consider themselves very lucky with the fact that most of their office spaces were already rented out when the crisis struck and that companies which now operate in them are bound with long term contracts. This left a rather small number of unused offices on the market and the demand for them also dropped because of the financial crisis. It may seem a little bit weird, but this situation is actually good for the market of commercial real estate in Croatia, which is now stable. If it had not come to this, the offer would eventually be much higher than demand and prices would drastically fall. Something like this already happened in some European markets.
Currently the development of new projects is put on hold because banks announced more strict conditions for getting loans, so now investors have to come up with their own source of financing. Despite all these problems, it is expected than the regional market of commercial real estate will continue to develop in the near future.

Has this global financial crisis brought us any good to the Croatian property market? What am I talking about now, you are probably wondering, cause how can any crisis be good, especialy when we are talking about real estate investment. Well, this might be true for highly developed markets, but Croatia is still an emerging market with a lot to learn.
The current situation with the market of apartments in Croatia is highly influenced by fear, which means that the reasons for real estate market weakening this way are not realistic, but rather imaginary.
If we compare the commercial real estate market in Europe in the last three months of 2008 with the first three months of 2009, we can see that the trade value dropped from 22,6 billion € to only 11,5 billion, which is a drop of almost 9 billion, or 44%. Leading analysts believe this is a result of the Lehman Brothers bank collapse that happened 6 months ago and caused several German real estate funds to close, whic in the end led to the entire European market collapsing.
Croatia’s tourism is one of country’s top branches of economy and many politicians are concerned that the crisis will not have a good effect on the tourist income this season.
Many Croatian politicians have claimed that Croatia’s entry to NATO is going to boost foreign investment interest and generally contribute to a positive picture about Croatia in the economic world.