Everything about housing construction development, facility management and maintenance - REBEC conference between June 21 and 23 in Belgrade

- Housing construction development and facility management, that is, the management and maintenance of facilities, are the two most interesting themes that will be discussed at the forthcoming exhibition-conference manifestation REBEC, which will be held between June 21 and 23 in Belgrade - says Aleksandar Opsenica, the founder of REBEC platform.

He points out that that manifestation gathers domestic and foreign real estate experts and investors and that it will be "transformed and expanded" this year, so that it will include total of 13 presentations.

Ocean Atlantics CEO for Serbia, Aleksandar Zavišić, points to the importance of organization of that event for more intensive work on the popularization of aforementioned topics in Serbia, primarily on the education of all participants in the market because the housing construction, as well as civil engineering as a whole, is "one of the most significant economic branches in Serbia" in general.

- After the lull in 2009, the real estate market started recovering in the first half of 2010, while the realization of bigger investment projects are expected in the second half of this year when having in mind the number of documentations and investor's increased readiness for construction - Goran Živković, the Sales Manager at CB Richard Elis in Serbia, points out.

Zoran Ćirić, a representative of Volksbank Srbija, says that the crisis has contributed to certain filtering of the market, and now the prices of apartments in the same location can not be the same if they were not built at the same time in the past. More favorable crediting terms will contribute to strengthening of the market in the second half of 2010. Therefore, the interest rate on mortgage loans is between 5 and 6%, while it ranges between 4 and 5.5% with the state subvention. All this contributed to the growth of apartment sales of 70%.

According to Opsenica, this year's participants in REBEC will be able to get more acquainted with the bank policies when it comes to the approval of loans for procurement of apartments, as well as the approval of project finance and legal regulations in that area.

All participants in the first conference occasioned by the organization of information platform REBEC 2010 in June came to the conclusion that the basic problems in one of the most important economic branches in Serbia - civil engineering, were lack of regulations, low level of education and lack of information.

The crisis is only one of the indications that the situation in this area is significantly changing and that the expert engineers who are able to coordinate the project from the idea to its realization will be necessary for as efficient and quick overcoming of the crisis as possible. Therefore, the participants in the conference pointed to the importance of REBEC 2010 because the experts and the public will be presented the housing construction and FM industry in broader sense, along with the review of prospects and the examples of good practice.

REBEC manifestation was created in 2008, in the tradition of the world's most famous real estate expos, with the aim of setting the platform for collecting information, linking experts and investors, attracting foreign funds and presenting the world the potentials for development of the real estate market in Serbia.