Empty Promises: Noam’s Ordeal on the Way to His Dream Apartment in Romania

Let’s start at the end this time. After a tough negotiation in which the buyer gave in to every one of the seller’s demands, two months later the sellers still hadn’t managed to produce all the documents and approvals needed for the sale, and the buyer, our client, simply found another apartment and bought it.

Now let’s go back to the beginning.

Noam booked a consultation call on Romania, and stressed that he intended to buy an apartment there and wanted the call to focus on that.

When he came to the meeting, Noam told me he had visited Bucharest several times over the past year, studied the city and its neighborhoods, and met quite a few Israeli and local agents and marketers, but so far hadn’t found an apartment that fit the needs and goals he had set himself. At the same time, he said he had heard and read a lot about everything involved in buying an apartment in Romania, but preferred to get all the information in one place from a professional who knows Romania and how things work there.

A few weeks after our meeting, Noam got in touch again and told me that the agent I had warmly recommended had found him an apartment and that he was flying out to see it.

Two days later he called to sing the apartment’s praises. It was a 3-room apartment in a central location, in an old building (with no risk of collapse in an earthquake), renovated a few years earlier, and its price matched the budget he had set aside for the investment. Noam asked our local partner to start a preliminary check of the property while he negotiated to improve the commercial terms of the deal.

The next call from Noam was less enthusiastic. It turned out the apartment had a number of defects that needed fixing. The sellers were a group of Israelis who had bought the apartment together, so the negotiation over the commercial terms was moving sluggishly, with no flexibility from the sellers. Despite the difficulties and the defects, Noam decided to buy the apartment. Now the sellers just had to complete various documents and present approvals so we could move toward completing the purchase.

A week went by, then two, and every time our local partner called to check when we would get the missing documents and could move on to signing the sale agreement, he was put off with answers like “a few more days”, “any minute now” and so on. After a month Noam told me he was starting to look for an alternative apartment, and if in the meantime the sellers completed what was needed and the deal could be closed, we would close it.

Just as in Israel, when we buy an apartment overseas we expect the parties to the deal to be transparent and fair. In Noam’s case, as far as I understood after talking to the agent, it seems the sellers couldn’t agree among themselves on the sale price, so one of them didn’t provide the documents required from him and thereby blocked the sale. Precious time, and no doubt costs too, would have been saved for Noam had he been given the full picture from the start, since presumably he wouldn’t have waited a month at all.

It’s also important to remember that buying property abroad sometimes involves bureaucratic delays. In Noam’s case, the sellers’ lack of cooperation led to significant delays. So be ready for possible delays and plan your timeline accordingly.

The saying “blink and you miss it” applies to sellers too, not just buyers, whether the purchase is in Israel or abroad. When there are several sellers, as in Noam’s case, make sure they are all in full agreement on the terms of the deal. Otherwise, if completing the deal drags on, there’s a good chance the buyer will do what Noam did and go looking for an alternative.