Muscovites began to actively buy luxury apartments in the center of St. Petersburg

Yekaterina Maksimova

The trend was fixed by real estate analysts. According to them, the demand among Muscovites is for apartments with finishing with an area of 70-100 square meters. m. Moreover, in previous years, the most popular were St. Petersburg apartments with a footage of 100-150 sq. m.

Buyers from Moscow are more likely to look for residential real estate in small club houses in the city center, while St. Petersburg residents themselves prefer objects in large new construction projects, but with their own parking.

Tatyana Lyubimova, director of the elite residential real estate department at Knight Frank St Petersburg, explained the growing interest of Muscovites in luxury real estate in St. Petersburg by the fact that previously wealthy buyers from Moscow preferred to invest in foreign real estate.

“Now I switched to the domestic market. For example, over the past two months, buyers from Moscow who applied to Knight Frank St.Petersburg purchased apartments, the cost of each of which exceeded the average requested budget by several times. We expect that the high interest of capital buyers in apartments in St. Petersburg will continue in the near future”, - commented Tatyana Lyubimova.

It is worth noting that luxury real estate in St. Petersburg has significantly increased in price over the past few years. In the first quarter of this year, the average cost of supply in the primary market of elite residential real estate in St. Petersburg amounted to 89.6 million rubles. In 2019, this indicator was at the level of 48.5 million rubles, thus, the increase was 85%.

Average cost per square meter of a luxury apartment exceeds 400 thousand rubles. Muscovites account for 12-13% of "elite" transactions.

According to Petersburg Real Estate analysts, in the premium real estate segment, almost 90% of demand falls on the Petrogradsky District, including 67% on Petrovsky Island.