Croatia and investment. Chalk and cheese.
There are two countries within Croatia, one of them is an investor’s paradise, with potential spilling over all of its sides, tourism on the rise, and a seemingly endless list of wonderful project opportunities just waiting for someone to grab them like dogs in a rescue shelter. The other one has quite a different face, which always ends up showing itself eventually. Owing to this, of the more than fifty projects deemed to be of considerable interest and benefit to the country, Colliers claims that only a dozen of them are actually ready for a new investor(s).
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 23rd of March, 2018, investors from all over the world have put aside more than three billion euros in funds for the Republic of Croatia over the next three years, but how much of these encouraging reserves will come to fruition and be transformed into various projects depends entirely on how the country responds and acts on it, which, in all honestly, doesn’t induce the most positive of feelings in anyone who knows a thing or two about how things go here, or, to be more honest, how they don’t go.
Based on the experiences of the experts from Colliers Croatia, who consult with serious investors, the Croatian market is very interesting to investors in general, it is also advantageous for investment money to grow at a low price, but the obstacle when it comes to actual realisation lies in the classic Croatian quagmire of unresolved property and legal issues, as well as administration issues and so forth, according to a report from Vecernji List.
“Croatia will be interesting for another two or three years. If we miss the opportunity, capital will just go to other destinations,” warned Vedrana Likan of Colliers.
Croatia is perceived as a safe country with very high, promising tourist potential, but its ongoing development is hindered and hampered by a bad overall business climate, the number of poor investment stories which hardly provoke a sense of inspiration in would-be investors, considerable levels of animosity towards foreign investors, not to mention the all too familiar tales of the unpredictability of projects actually coming to fruition owing to a poorly oiled system and its many needless complications and constraints.
The above paragraph is a likely story and one that is all too over saturated and morbidly familiar to investors who fancy flashing some of their cash here in Croatia, and is just part of the long list of burdensome and stagnating reasons why other nations that once made up the former Yugoslavia are gradually gaining ground and catching up with Croatia, the country which masochistically manages to repeatedly bind its wrists with its very own hands, time and time again.
