Analyse de marche

Saint-Petersburg is a truly historical city and thus it’s quite logical that the apartments in historical buildings are always in great demand. Though if some years ago these apartments were being exposed on the market for a short period of time, now the situation has changed. The customers have high requirements to comfortable elite real estate, and unfortunately the situation with elite real estate in the city center is not that good. The fact is that all the interesting objects are already sold out and are rarely back for sale again and the rest of the flats are located in the houses that do not meet the requirements applied to elite real estate. Typically, these are the buildings which are difficult to be fully reconstructed, with bad communication system, without any parking facilities. All these components constitute comfortable elite real estate. Thus this kind of apartments is not popular among the clients.

Still the experts say that nowadays less and less customers are interested in the apartments “with history”, the majority of clients are looking  for an apartment located in modern elite buildings because it’s associated with more comfort  for future tenants.  At the same time there are not so many historic apartments being offered on the market. Usually these are the apartments in the historical buildings that are built by famous architects and considered to be architectural heritage, the apartments that were previously inhabited by famous people and also real estate objects with a view. Almost all these apartments are already sold out and if they come to the open market they are too overpriced. The pricing on after-market is quite subjective and the cost for the apartment can be inadequate. Thus, it’s cost-efficient to buy the apartment in recently constructed buildings as the historical apartments are not that attractive for investment. However, it’s a common truth that the apartments in the historical buildings have its own charm and atmosphere – it’s so nice to realize that centuries ago some famous writer like Pushkin or Blok was staying in the apartment. Every customer has its own preferences and what for one is a typical offer, for the other one will be a dream to come true.  However the customer who is looking for a certain apartment at an exact address or the apartment that once belonged to a famous person is a rare one, still sometimes real estate agencies get requests like this. Such narrow requests are connected with a number of difficulties. Reconstruction of the historic apartments is a hard task, connected with lots of necessary paperwork. Also the houses with great history are often protected and guarded by the state. Moreover, the demands of the sellers are often inadequate and the price they demand is often 20-40 % above the market.

When purchasing the apartment in the historical buildings special attention should be paid to the year of major renovation of the building, the condition of the walls and the ceiling as well as the of the communication system.

It must be said that historic apartments in Saint-Petersburg has become an exclusive offer. And though these rare offers will be always in great demand, modern tendency is that newly constructed real estate objects become more and more popular on the market.