Year of Huge Demand and Insufficient Supply
In many ways, Moscow’s real estate market resembles a rich teenager with a messy room, a few personal problems and not a lot of discipline.
The teenager’s parents are high oil and gas prices — which continue to fuel Moscow’s explosive growth for a fifth year in a row — and there is no reason to think that 2008 will be any different.
In all sectors of the city’s real estate market, demand continues to far outstrip supply. As with oil and gas prices, no end to this is in sight.
Even the liquidity crunch and the subprime crisis — terms scary enough to give nightmares to realtors from the United States to Kazakhstan — seem to have had little effect on real estate in Moscow or the rest of Russia.
The “new oil” is how Sergei Riabokobylko, the Moscow director of realty firm Cushman and Wakefield, described real estate in an interview with Bloomberg in early 2007.
Retail
Retail property came in like a lion in 2007. In the first quarter of the year alone, the sector drew $322 million worth of investment nationwide, according to Jones Lang LaSalle. This figure made Russia the second-biggest market in Europe, after Germany.
Among the main developments in Moscow was the opening in September of Lotte Plaza, a 85,000-square-meter complex of shops and offices located at the intersection of the Garden Ring and Novy Arbat.
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Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 5:38 pm under