By Peter Bennett, Director, Property Secrets & i-PropertyAssets

2007 was a year of great expectation for mortgage finance in Central and Eastern Europe. A number of banks and brokerages looked to expand beyond their national borders, or from domestic mortgages to products for foreigners.

The reality was somewhat mixed. We expected more products to appear in the Romanian market, for example, with banks like Piraeus (which have London offices in addition to being headquartered in Greece), but they didn't materialise.

We also expected to see the growing number of products and improvements in rates for domestic buyers to be reflected in the products available for foreigners, but, although this happened, it didn't happen as quickly as we hoped.

In some areas we began to see an adverse effect whereby the attractiveness of the domestic markets caused lenders to focus almost exclusively on these easy-to-serve borrowers, rather than on the somewhat more complicated overseas customers.