Bro, sit down and let me tell you what I found out today – my jaw dropped! These Pavăl brothers, who own Dedeman stores everywhere, don't just stop at selling screws and paint. Nah, bro, they've got a real estate portfolio like they're playing Monopoly for real. Last year, just from office building rents, they pocketed a profit of nearly 20 million euros! And no joke, I saw the numbers on economica.net. Their turnover at these companies was 83 million euros, that's 417 million lei. Can you even imagine what that kind of money means? Me, with my 2008 BMW payments and Mioara counting every leu at Lidl, I look at them and think: man, why not me?
Their portfolio has 14 office buildings: 13 in Bucharest and one in Cluj, called "The Office." That Cluj one is the "crown jewel," bringing in a turnover of 80 million lei all by itself. In Cluj, where a studio apartment costs as much as an average yearly salary, they're raking it in with office rents. But it's not all roses: three buildings – River Place, Campus 6.1, and Dacia One – lost 16 million lei in 2025. On the flip side, the other 11 companies made a profit of 99.6 million lei, that's 19.7 million euros. Sure, it's down 12% from last year, but still a massive pile of cash.
These brothers got into real estate in 2018 when they bought The Bridge complex near Basarab overpass. Before that, in 2017, they tried to grab the buildings near AFI Cotroceni, but it didn't work out. Now they're eyeing everything and hoarding like back in the day. I think of Mioara clipping coupons and me dreaming of a vacation in Antalya, and I just have to laugh.
But it doesn't end there. In Giurgiu, a superalloy factory for airplanes, Meterra, was sold at auction for 4.4 million euros – more than three times the starting price of 1.28 million. Who bought it? A foreign company, because hey, it's cheap here. The factory sits on 35,000 square meters in the Giurgiu Free Zone, with a hall from the '70s partially modernized in 2011. It went bankrupt in March 2025, and the liquidator CITR put it up for sale. As they say: "What's ours is also the foreigners'."
And since we're talking money, you should know that the number of Romanians with bank deposits over 100,000 euros rose to 87,351 by the end of 2025, after three quarters of decline. They've stashed 20 billion euros there, a quarter of all household deposits. These stats are from the Deposit Guarantee Fund. Who are these people? Probably folks like Pavăl, not like us, saving 50 lei a month.
On another note, abroad, the Italians want to build a 14-billion-euro bridge between the mainland and Sicily. If it happens, it'll kill off the last train that goes by ferry – the Intercity Notte from Rome to Sicily. Nice for them, but here, if they built a bridge over the Danube at Giurgiu, maybe factories wouldn't flee abroad. So, bro, go big and don't forget: money is made from rent, not from grunt work. I'm off to tell Brian to quit TikTok and become a real estate developer.
