The Fourth Annual Conference on Real Estate took place on March 03, 2009 at the Hyatt Hotel in Belgrade.

This year’s Conference was again attended by a number of prominent guests both from Serbia and abroad. It consisted of four Panels discussing the issues related to the real estate market in South East Europe.

Mr O. Dulić, Serbian Minister of Environmental Protection and Spatial Planning stated that for the time being the real estate prices in Belgrade were not falling and that the position in relation to supply and demand had not changed.

We are pleased to announce that the Head of our Real Estate Department, Aleksandar Mančev, participated in the Panel 2: Residential construction. Mr Mančev made comments on the Draft Law on Urban Development Planning, Construction Land and Construction. He stated that:

“The proposed Law must have more mechanisms for enforcement of these good ideas. A lot of issues left for sublegal enactments should be regulated by the Law. In the Draft Law changes are best defined in the field of construction land. For potential investors it is most important that Articles 86 and 87 of the Draft Law practically cancel the provisions on land nationalization in the city area, regarding former owners of land and their successors whose ownership rights of the land has been changed into rights for utilization of the land, pursuant to the regulations on nationalization.

The biggest change in this Law is the introduction of a fee for land favorability, which is the right way for stimulating owners of old facilities to use their land for residential construction. Owners of facilities on the land, as well as users of the land will be obligated to pay fees not for the surface of the facilities they own, but for the surface of facilities they might construct, and the fee will also include land orderliness coefficient, which represents the state contribution for construction of road and other infrastructure leading to the location.

This Law foresees the establishment of a central registry of planning documents, but not the formation of an electronic central registry, available on the Internet to all interested citizens”.