New Urban Planning Code to be examined at legal conference

Romania’s new Urban Planning Code will be among the main subjects at a legal conference examining business relations with public authorities. The Society of Legal Sciences will hold the event on September 10, and JURIDICE.ro will broadcast it live for free.

The conference will also cover VAT, investment and public procurement. Judges from Romania’s High Court of Cassation and Justice and the Bucharest Court of Appeal are expected to take part, along with lawyers, law faculty representatives, the Financial Supervisory Authority and the Competition Council.

Adopted on July 30, the new code changes how the real estate market may assess land value. The key factor could become “urban-planning certainty”, meaning how clearly a buyer can know what may be built on a plot, under which conditions and within what predictable timeframe.

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From an evaluator’s perspective, the most important change is that we will place an increasingly higher value on certainty, because we will know what can be built, under what conditions and within what timeframe.

That certainty could raise the value of land with clear planning rules. The difference from plots dependent on future planning procedures could reach an indicative 10% to 20%, the article says. Andrei Botiș, CEO of NAI Romania and an authorized valuer, said the market would increasingly reward what is certain rather than what developers merely hope to build later.

The effects will not appear immediately after the code enters into force. They are expected to develop gradually as the new procedures are applied, with the full benefits estimated only from 2027. The code does not automatically mean higher home prices, since the impact will mainly depend on supply and demand.

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In short, the market will pay more for what is certain and less for promises.