The Permit That Never Came

Erez called me in the morning. He didn’t ask for advice. He didn’t ask a question. He said one sentence:

“Ilan, it’s been a year and a half. There’s still no permit. And I have ten buyers waiting.”

I knew that tone. Not someone asking for advice – someone who has nowhere left to go.

Erez is a serious developer. He has done projects in Israel; he knows timelines, knows delays, knows contractors who run late. He didn’t go into Romania out of naivety; he went in with his eyes open. Cheap land, growing demand, rising prices. He did his checks. He visited countless times before making a decision. He brought in a local partner with a track record and recommendations from people who had already worked with him.

The partner told him, straight and without hesitation: “Four months and you’ll have a permit. I know the right people at the city hall.”

With recommendations like that, with that kind of confidence, it’s hard not to believe.

Erez bought the land. He signed sale agreements with ten buyers – all Israelis, all investors he knew. Agreements with a set handover date. A stated price. A commitment in writing.

Four months passed. The permit didn’t come.

The local partner explained: “The authority has asked for a small correction to the plan. A week or two.”

Two weeks later: “They want an opinion from an independent engineer. We’ll sort it.”

Another month later: “There’s an issue with the boundary documentation for the neighbouring property. It isn’t ours, but they’re linking it. Not fair, but that’s how it is.”

Every time, “it’s two weeks”. Every time, it dragged on for a month or more. Erez tried to solve it from the inside, through the partner, through the connections the partner had promised he had. Without understanding that these were exactly the tools that no longer worked.

When he came to me, after a year and a half, I asked him to send all the documentation. The agreements, the permit application file, the correspondence with the authority, everything there was.

I read it all. And then I understood what had happened.

Romanian law sets deadlines. When you submit an application for a building permit, the authority has a defined period in which to respond – approval, refusal or a request for correction. That isn’t custom; it’s law. But in Erez’s file I saw a pattern repeating itself: every time the authority asked for a correction, the application was resubmitted incomplete. Annexes were missing; forms weren’t filled in as required. Every defective submission restarted the clock from zero, and so a process that should take months stretched into years – not out of malice, but because of a lack of professionalism on the part of whoever was supposed to be managing it.

The problem wasn’t only legal. A building-permit application is teamwork – an architect, engineers, a lawyer. Each is responsible for their part of the file. When a submission comes back from the authority with comments, you need to know who handles each detail – technical, planning, legal. In Erez’s team there was no such clarity. The partner kept everything in his own hands and didn’t delegate. When he ran into a difficulty he didn’t know how to solve, he didn’t admit it. He sent Erez an update.

I asked Erez a direct question: who exactly is handling the application at the authority? The architect? A local lawyer? The partner himself?

He couldn’t answer precisely. “The partner’s sorting it,” he said.

That’s the moment I understood that the real problem wasn’t the bureaucracy. It was the fact that nobody was managing the process properly, and nobody knew enough about this particular authority to know what it required.

In Romania, as in Greece and Cyprus, the authorities are hyper-local. What works in Cluj doesn’t work in Bucharest. What works in one department doesn’t work in the department next door. When a partner announces “I have connections at the city hall”, the question to ask is: which city hall exactly? Which approval track? And what has he actually done there?

Erez didn’t ask. I wasn’t there at that stage.

We worked on two levels. First, we rebuilt the team. A local lawyer with proven experience in building permits in that specific area, an architect who knows that authority’s requirements, and someone to coordinate between them and make sure every submission goes out complete. Not people the partner recommended – people we found through independent checks.

Second, we wrote to the buyers. Not a letter trying to reassure them. An honest update with a realistic timeline and what was being done. People cope better with a hard reality than with silence.

Erez got the permit after twenty-two months.

The project went ahead.

The apartments were handed over late, with compensation for some of the buyers, three of whom hired separate lawyers. What could have been a successful first project abroad became something he came out of exhausted.

He said to me at the end: “On the next project, I check the team first, and only then build.”

That’s the right sentence. It would just have been better to say it beforehand.

If you’re Israeli developers bringing a local partner into a project abroad, before you sign sale agreements with buyers, make sure you have a clear professional team: who submits, who follows up, who coordinates, and who holds responsibility when a comment comes back from the authority. Connections are an asset, but only when you know exactly what they’re worth and where they work.