Erez called me in the morning. He didn't ask for advice. He didn't ask a question. He said one sentence:
“Ilan, a year and a half has passed. 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 had done projects in Israel, knows schedules, knows delays, knows contractors who run late. He didn't enter Romania out of naivety, he entered in a calculated way. Cheap land, growing demand, rising prices. He ran checks. He visited countless times before making a decision. He brought in a local partner with a track record, with recommendations from people who had already worked with him.
The partner told him, straight out and without stammering: “Four months and you have a permit. I know the right people at city hall.”
With recommendations like that, with that confidence, it's hard not to believe.
Erez bought the land. Signed sale agreements with ten buyers, all Israelis, all investors he knew. Agreements with a defined delivery date. A stated price. A written commitment.
Four months passed. The permit didn't come.
The local partner explained: “The authority asked for a small correction in the plan. A week or two.”
Two weeks later: “They want an opinion from an independent engineer. We'll arrange it.”
A month after that: “There's an issue with the documentation of the boundary with the adjacent property. Not ours, but they link it. Not fair, but that's what there is.”
Every time, “it's two weeks.” Every time it stretched to a month or more. Erez tried to solve it from the inside, through the partner, through the connections the partner promised he had. Without understanding that these were exactly the tools that no longer worked.
When he turned 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 an application for a building permit is submitted, the authority has a defined period to respond - approval, refusal, or a request for correction. That's not custom, it's law. But in Erez's file I saw a recurring pattern: every time the authority asked for a correction, the application was resubmitted with gaps. Attachments were missing, forms weren't filled out as required. Every deficient filing restarted the clock from zero, and so a process that should take months stretched into years, not out of malice, but out of the lack of professionalism of whoever was supposed to manage 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 filing comes back from the authority with comments, you need to know who handles each item, technical, planning, legal. In Erez's team there was no such clarity. The partner concentrated 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 handles the application at the authority? The architect? A local lawyer? The partner himself?
He couldn't say exactly. “The partner arranges it,” he said.
That was the moment I understood the real problem wasn't the bureaucracy. It was the fact that no one was managing the process properly, and no one knew enough about this specific authority to know what it requires.
In Romania, as in Greece and Cyprus, 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. A partner who declares “I have connections at city hall” - the question to ask is: at which city hall, exactly? In which approval track? And what did he actually do 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 filing goes out complete. Not the person the partner recommended, but whoever we found through independent vetting.
Second, we wrote to the buyers. Not a letter that tries to reassure. An honest update with a realistic timeline and with what was being done. People cope better with a hard reality than with silence.
Erez received the permit after twenty-two months.
The project got underway.
The apartments were delivered, late, with compensation to some of the buyers, with three who hired separate lawyers. What could have been a successful first project abroad became something he came away from exhausted.
He said to me at the end: “The next project, I check the team first, and only then build.”
That's the right sentence. It would have been better to say it earlier.
If you are Israeli developers bringing a local partner into a project abroad, before signing 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 arrives from the authority. Connections are an asset, but only when you know exactly what they are worth and where they work.
Stories are based on real situations, with identifying details changed. Not legal advice.
Translated from the Hebrew original. עברית