The property industry is part and parcel of the wider economy, and property business success is largely about tailoring investment projects to future economic trends. However, that doesn’t mean that property investors need to be just passive risk takers. The future is not out of our hands. Indeed, the main purpose of organised real estate is to be a player in the political process that helps shape the economy. For real estate, that ‘economy’ is increasingly the EU. Though real estate is by its nature subject to national and sub-national regulation, the levers of macro-economic policy are shifting to the EU. Global investors and analysts increasingly think in terms of asset allocation to the EU and Romanian real estate has to demonstrate comparative advantage in that context.