Luxury real estate trends – 2024: capital repatriation

The current year has demonstrated a significant increase in demand for elite real estate in Moscow – by more than 50% compared to the first half of 2023. This is due not only to the availability of available funds, but also to the growth of the supply volume and its wide variability. At the same time, the concepts of elite real estate projects are evolving more and more rapidly. New criteria for choosing future housing are also emerging. Olga Zyblaya, Sales and Marketing Director of Turandot Residences & Artisan Clubhouses, tells us what has changed in the behavior of buyers of elite real estate in Moscow and how their portrait, tastes and preferences have been transformed over the last year.

Capital repatriation

In connection with the current global economic landscape among buyers of high-budget real estate in Moscow, those who decided to re-emigrate and bring to Moscow their children, who were educated in Europe and the United States, are actively showing themselves. Previously, this category of clients invested in real estate in other countries, but now they have reoriented themselves to the Russian market, and are selecting lots that will become a family asset for many generations.

Interesting trends include the increasing number of applications to the developer’s sales office from clients who own foreign real estate and are looking for a suitable object to buy in Moscow, with a proposal to sell their foreign apartment in order to buy housing in a particular project. For example, in our practice we have recorded about 15% of such requests from the total number of client inquiries. Moreover, several of them concerned real estate in the UAE and, in particular, in Dubai. Working on such requests with the help of foreign broker-partners, we do not expect guarantees from the buyer, but strive to build friendly client relations, which can bear fruit in the future, for example, in the form of recommendations to friends and acquaintances.

Moscow is not alone

There has been a noticeable increase in the number of regional buyers who are actively looking for status options in Moscow real estate. These include top managers of large companies from various sectors of the economy, who receive more favorable HR-offers in Moscow and move with their families. And representatives of trade and manufacturing businesses working in the field of import substitution. Their share has remained virtually unchanged over the last year and remains at the level of 60%.
The geography of the audience is the widest. For example, representatives of Krasnodar, Kazan, Smolensk, Ulyanovsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk and the Kamchatka region showed interest in our projects located in the heart of Moscow on Arbat. A special category of buyers of elite projects is occupied by diplomats from the Middle East and South-East Asia, their share does not exceed 3% of the total number of applications.

Exceptional privacy

Privacy has always been one of the important criteria when choosing elite housing, but now it is not about homogeneity of the environment and safety. For a certain category of clients, a significant characteristic of their future housing should be the invisibility of the project in the urban landscape, guaranteeing a certain secrecy and even secrecy, when it is impossible to determine that in the very center of Moscow behind one of the facades hides an elite club house. For such a public, the image accompanying the name of the house or the eye-catching architecture by a world-famous star bureau is not important, privacy is more important.

Practicality and awareness

Buyers of expensive real estate have realized that the external appearance is a pleasant addition, and that it is much more important how well the house is built, what kind of engineering and technical filling it has, what materials are used to finish public areas and how environmentally friendly they are. The main requirement is the functionality of layouts and the ability to maximize the use of every corner of the living space. And this is despite the fact that over the past year the greatest demand is for large lots – apartments in predominantly finished houses with an area of 100 to 200 square meters. meters. m. There is another trend here: the desire to organize all auxiliary rooms as conveniently as possible – laundry rooms and dressing rooms, offices and rooms for tutoring, service kitchens and spaces for household assistants, etc. Especially valued are apartments where two entrances can be arranged: front and staff. This became a trend in 2023, which continues to develop now

Without finishing

Buyers have become quite cautious in choosing apartments with finishing, taking into account the difficulties with delivery of premium finishing materials, and, as a consequence, the increase in the time of repair works. In some cases, the quality of finishing in new projects is also questionable. According to our data, over the last two years the request for purchase of elite apartments with finishing has halved – from 50% to 25% of the total number of requests. This figure demonstrates the request “at the entrance”, i.e. at the initial communication with the client, and in the process of subsequent work and clarification of the true needs, they change the criteria for selecting housing, giving preference to options without finishing. We have had cases when, after a year of searching for a suitable apartment with finishing, buyers came to the conclusion that it is better to choose an apartment without finishing, but with the right layout, and do the repairs themselves, even though they lost time, but in return they received housing with parameters that perfectly fit their life scenario

In the elite projects that entered the capital market over the last year, there were practically no such projects where the entire volume of supply is realized with finishing. Developers choose the strategy of diversification, when only some part of apartments is offered with partial or full finishing (white box or finish). In my opinion, the ideal balance is achieved when 50% of lots are offered without finishing, the share of apartments with white box finishing is 30% and 20% of lots are sold with finishing.

Summarizing, I note that now the buyers of high-budget real estate in the capital have formed a substantive request, for whom and what purposes they are buying real estate, while three to five years ago they have been studying the market for years. Buyers have become even more carefully study all the nuances – engineering stuffing of the house, layouts, the composition of neighbors, the reliability of the developer and its legal entities to minimize risks and confirm its status. Although, in general, the time of decision-making on the purchase of real estate has become almost twice as long and is 6-9 months. Speaking about prices, according to our data, in the first six months of 2024, the average price per square meter of elite real estate in Moscow reached 2.3 million rubles, taking into account new elite class projects within the Central Administrative District that are underway and have entered the market, thus renewing another record.

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