Question of the Day: where do Russians get money to buy real estate?

Sociologist Pyotr Ivanov asked himself in his blog: who in Russia buys all this endlessly built real estate in cities? The question is really relevant, given that no more than 6-8% of citizens take mortgage loans in Russia. For comparison: the French who took out a mortgage - 30%, on average in Europe this figure is 25%, and in America it is 65%! So where do our fellow citizens get such big money from?

Even under the current preferential mortgage in 2022, only 30% of real estate acquisition transactions were concluded in Russia. Moreover, according to VTsIOM, only 33% of Russians have at least some savings, most often it is something like 100 thousand rubles set aside for a “rainy day”. And yet, they still buy a new home!

The inheritance option is also not suitable here, since the Russians own 80% of the apartments, 48% of which were bought for their hard-earned money without the help of a mortgage, and only 23% were inherited.

The sociologist is perplexed and admits that he does not know the answer to this question:

“A paradoxical situation arises - wages are low, there are no savings, there is no inheritance, mortgages are not very popular, but there is money to buy apartments. And more. To be honest, I don’t have any good explanation for this yet…”

Ivanov's readers tried to find the answer in the comments. For example, like this:

- I also asked myself this question, because sometimes you can see with the naked eye that the houses are empty. I asked a question to one politician, he explained to me. Construction companies constantly take subsidies from the state to maintain jobs and pay salaries. In short, they build to build.

Grandmother saved up for an apartment for 20 years in retirement

And yet the matter is in savings, many believe:

- People move by selling apartments they already own. Plus years of savings. We have already changed 5 apartments, except that we did not take new buildings, only resale. The main reasons are labor migration and family reunification. There is another option, when still active pensioners move to resort towns, for example, Anapa.

- Oddly enough, most often - money for the purchase of housing is taken from pensioners (grandparents). The pensioner saved up his pension for 5-10-20 years and now he has accumulated it. This is quite realistic if pensioners live in the same house with adult children and take care of the household. Yes, far to go. My grandmother lived on 10 tr. per month in Krasnoyarsk and half (minimum) of the diet was covered with food from the dacha. Although the pension was 2.5 times higher. She just got used to it and was the "magician" of organizing the budget.

Inheritance is a difficult but promising business

Not everything just turned out with housing, which is inherited:

- Inheritance is a complicated thing: 6 months (the date of opening the inheritance) nothing can be done with the inheritance property and it seems like it has not yet been determined whose; when buying an inherited apartment, the buyer always has an unremovable risk that a person will show up and say “I’m the unrecorded heir of your seller’s grandmother, I didn’t know about her death, and now I came for my property” and because of this, inherited apartments are sold at a discount. Well, disputes over the inheritance, sowing enmity between brothers, is also a well-known and unpleasant matter.

People who are aware of these subtleties try to avoid inheritance and, reaching old age, “rewrite” apartments for children in advance. “Rewriting” can legally be a donation, or it can be a sale (possibly, but not necessarily fictitious: the money still remains in the budget of one family).

Therefore, some of the "bought" apartments may well be in reality inherited, falling into the "bought" solely from the desire of the owners to avoid the inconveniently regulated inheritance procedure.

The real estate market is ruled by shadow incomes

However, the main source of funds for the purchase of real estate, according to the majority, is gray income:

- I think basically this is not quite pure money, if you know the cost of housing, in conditional Moscow and the average salary. That's all. My friends are all in mortgages.

- In depressed villages, people leave to work on a rotational basis (60-100-200 thousand), the service sector in settlements, gray employment with undeclared income (50-150 thousand), the sale of inherited real estate. Those. enough to buy this very housing. I'm rather perplexed: how is it possible to buy this. But then again, the colleagues above make good arguments.

- I think, firstly, that we have not closed the housing issue itself. A large number of people still do not have enough square meters at their disposal (statistics on square meters per capita show the same as the average temperature in the hospital). As a result, the demand for economical square meters remains at a fairly high level. After the demand is satisfied, there will be a massive demand for more expensive segments of housing.

Secondly, with regard to money. Do not forget about the rather large shadow financial market in the Russian Federation (salaries in an envelope, informal employment). This is what statistics do not see. According to data published on the Web, it can be judged that about 25-30% of the working population officially has no income.