Thousands of Bucharest residents have been waiting for years for the recognition of a right guaranteed by law. Few know that they can get it faster

More than 15,000 Bucharest residents have been waiting for years for the local authorities to recognize their legal ownership of the land around their homes, without knowing that they can get it faster, according to the law.

Many Romanians do not know that they can obtain the property right faster. Archive photo

Two years ago, the vice-mayor of the Capital, Stelian Bujduveanu, announced that over 15,400 Bucharest families owned the property of their home, but not the land related to it. The situation is almost identical in 2025, with over 15,000 applications waiting to be resolved on the table of the local authorities, and the main reason why their number does not decrease is that the decisions from the authorities are delayed for years, although there is the legal basis for obtaining this right.

The procedure is simple, the owner having to submit an application for establishing ownership of the land, accompanied by a series of supporting documents, to the town hall of the sector within whose radius the land is located, which issues a proposal: admission or rejection of the application. Based on the proposal, the Prefect resolves the request, either in the sense of admitting and issuing the prefect's order, or in the sense of rejection.

Property rights are regulated in Romania by several laws: Law no. 18/1991 (Land Fund Law), which was then amended by Law no. 231/2018, then by Law no. 105/2019 and by Law 87/2020. But there is also Law no. 112/1995, which regulates the legal situation of some buildings intended for housing passed into the ownership of the state.

The lawyer Răzvan Popescu, specialized in the matter of land laws, claims that if you want to legally obtain the property right, it is not necessary to untangle all the legislation.

“You only need to submit an application to request the competent authorities – the sector municipalities – to establish the ownership right over the related land, based on the provisions of Law no. 18/1991, as amended by Law no. 87/2020. However, there are a number of conditions that must be met for the request to be accepted: the persons making the request must be the owners of the buildings, and the respective buildings must be registered in the land register, cadastral or agricultural registers and registered in the tax records. And, last but not least, for the respective land, there should be no other requests for the establishment or reconstitution of the ownership right from other people“, he explained.

Some Bucharest residents have been waiting for 5 years for their property rights to be recognized

Unfortunately, although many Bucharest residents have submitted all the required documents, the issuing of the decision takes even more than 5 years, during which time they continue to pay rent for the related land.

“Some applicants from the Capital have been waiting for almost five years for the decisions establishing the property right. The fact that the competent authorities have a small number of employees who deal with these requests is also to blame. But also because, for the settlement of a request, the opinion of other state institutions is also necessary and the delays accumulate“, explains the lawyer.

According to him, the solution to shorten the waiting time is to appeal to the courts. Applicants can invoke the “tacit refusal” of the authorities if the response is delayed within a year, maximum two, from the submission of the application.

Not only the immediate owners, but also their heirs, as well as those who acquired them from the first buyers, can appeal to the law. And the law applies regardless of the date of acquisition of the property right over the constructions.