Dear Richard,

The major issue is wheither banks in Romania can finance non-residents or not.

The majority of Romanian banks can only source a mortgage if you are indeed a (temporary) resident in Romania.

This is the first hurdle (and an imporant one to take into consideration that not all banks can or want to finance non-residents!)

Second hurdle is, that the majority of Romanian banks are not accepting income from abroad. Or if they do, only under very special circumstances.

Futhermore, if banks accept non-residents with foreign income , they all will require documents to be translated/legalized (apostilled) before even taking your application in consideration. In our option, all documents to be shown can be sent in PDF (by email) without translations/legalisations and the clients gets a mortgage quotation in writing from us, with a succes rate mentioned based on the client's profile.

This is more effective than just blindly applying at any bank

Another issue is that there are extremely few banks that accept income from self employment . We can source self employed non-residents without any problems (other banks hardly do it, or they don't do it at all)

You also have to look at pricing. Also the majority of banks charge too much. Llike Volksbank, a bank who accepts non-residents with income from abroad is charging monthly fees, yearly fees, currency risk fees and simply lie about the fact that the interest is fixed for the total duration of the loan (which is an utter lie, as they have changed previous costumers' interes rates to their own liking).

Pricing of Romanian mortgages can not be compared to UK or Dutch mortgages, but we as Easy Credit obtain our clients the best offer on the market for non-residents with income from abroad.

Our offer is free of monthly or yearly fees and the installment contains "interest and capital" only (unlike the offer from Volksbank or Raiffeisen Bank for instance)

Please keep in mind that finding a bank is not difficult at all, but finding the bank that accepts non-residents with foreign income is a lot more difficult! And one has to watch out for 'hidden' fees like monthly or yearly fees (percentages!) which do not apply to our offer!

But more important, if you apply (from abroad), then the procedure can take ages, and depends on the competence of the bank you're dealing with. We (as Easy Credit) monitor the file (sent to us in electronic format by the client) from beginning until final approval, offering aditional legal and tax advice as well, and being exactly the middle man between client and bank.

Trust me that Romanian banks love to ask for more and more paperwork (they think the more papers they have the better the file looks). We as Easy Credit try to reduce the paperwork to the minimum. If the bank would require aditional paperwork they will have to provide us (Easy Credit) with solid arguments. If they don't , we take the file higher up to a manager that is capable of understanding our client's mortgage file.

It sounds a bit negative, but the majority of Romanian banks are not very well known for their customer orientation neither do they provide the client this ''little extra" information that is extremely important for non-resident clients who do not know all the problems or pittfalls regarding applying for a mortgage and buying a property in Romania.

Stefan