Bricks and Mortar, back to the bubble

At 80 percent, Russia has the second highest level of home ownership in Europe after Ireland, but unlike the Irish (or indeed any other Europeans) almost no one has a mortgage. 

The state simply gave people the apartments or houses they occupied after the collapse of the Soviet Union in what must be one of the biggest transfers of wealth in history. Russians had an average of 16.8 square meters of space per person in 1990, worth nearly $3,000 billion today – about twice the value of GDP. 

However, estimating property values is pretty arbitrary. While eight out of 10 Russians say they want to move, very few are able to do so. There are only about 300,000 mortgage contracts in the whole country: less than half of 1 percent of the population has borrowed from a bank to buy their home. "During the worst of the crisis, the top end of the market was not affected at all. No one wanted to sell. They didn't want the cash as they had nowhere to put it," said Ekaterina Thain, founder of Chesterton Russia, a real estate agency in Moscow. "In business class, prices came down by 30 percent, and in economy class they were down by 50 percent. However, prices already began to recover in 2009 and now they are almost back to pre-crisis levels." 

The average price of Moscow residential real estate has soared from around $900 per square meter in 2003 when mortgages first became available, reaching $4,000 in January 2010 and $5,107 as of August this year, according to the website Irn.ru. 

Prices were also propped up, as any Russians with money ploughed it to real estate, the preferred asset class during the worst of the crisis. And as Thain points out, there is still a huge housing shortfall in Moscow and the country as a whole. 

No vacancies 

In the economic boom from about 2006, real estate became a "get rich quick" deal for many businesses that poured money into ill planned projects, said Darrell Stanaford, Managing Director, CB Richard Ellis Russia. According to Stanaford, in the spring of 2008, over a million square meters of new office space was added to the city's stock of 12 million square meters, so when prices began to fall they collapsed completely. 

The reanimation of the market was clearly seen in early September when government statistics agency Rosstat reported a jump in July construction volumes, up 17.8 percent year-on-year after being moribund for most of the previous 18 months. Developers who had borrowed heavily to finance projects have largely restructured their loans – or lost their assets to banks – and are now able to raise fresh money to finish half-completed buildings that were abandoned during the crisis. 

"Before the crisis there were no vacancies and the trick to was to do the deal fast before prices went up further – if you could get the building at all," said Stanaford. "Now there is supply but the gap between supply and demand is closing fast." 

Moscow's new administration is working on a development plan for the capital and says it plans to double the size of the city, building suburbs in the western European style. But this will take several years and redevelopment of the centre of Moscow is still badly needed. "A city is like an ocean liner. It takes time to change direction and it is best to do it slowly and get it right," said Stanaford."

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