Nov. 16 – The Federal Service for State Registration, Cadaster and Cartography, known as Rosregister, will launch a new online service providing information about each real estate deal that has been made in every Russian region.
Information about all registered real estate deals since 1999 will also be published in the new portal. For example, by some estimates, 17 million real estate deals were made in Russia last year. Read the rest of this entry »
Apr. 25 – Belgium Rezidor Hotel Group, an international hotel operator, increased its presence in Russia by opening a premier business 150-room Park Inn in Novosibirsk. The operator also plans to open up 10 to 20 more hotels across the country, a company press release said.
The first hotel in Siberian Novosibirsk will be developed in cooperation with Regional Hotel Chain (RHC), one of Rezidor’s development partners in Russia.
“We are delighted to have signed the eighth contract with RHC. It further strengthens our common target to open 10 to 20 Park Inn hotels across Russia,” commented Kurt Ritter, CEO of Rezidor. The opening of next Park Inn is planned in Astrakhan for June 2011. Read the rest of this entry »
Mar 28. – The Auction House of the Russian Federation will open a sub-office in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk on Wednesday. By the end of the year, the Auction House plans to sell properties worth about US$34.5 billion.
The sub-office will put on the market assets of their clients from several regions of Siberia, including Novosibirsk, Kemerovo, Tomsk, Altay, and Altai Republic. Read the rest of this entry »
Feb. 1 – Moscow remained in the focus of investors’ interest in 2010 with 94 percent of all investments into a commercial property during the last year come up to Moscow, Cushman & Wakefield have calculated. All other Russian regions have got only 6 percent of investments into commercial property.
Year 2010 became a turning point and has demonstrated many changes in market trends: rental rates are rising, vacancies are shrinking and yields are compressing. Most of the investors became very active trying to acquire properties at the right phase of the market cycle, says a new Investment Snapshot by Cushman & Wakefield. Read the rest of this entry »
Jan. 19 – A new Kremlin decree issued by President Dmitry Medvedev last week bans foreigners from buying land near federal borders.
The border zone was not clearly defined in legislation dating back to 2001. A ban on the ownership of real estate by foreigners has been in force in Russia’s border areas for some time, but the scope of the border area has not been definitively established. Read the rest of this entry »
Sept. 22 – Russian Technologies (Rostehnoliogii), a state-run industrial corporation, signed agreements on Friday with two companies from the United Arab Emirates – the ports and logistics unit of Crescent Group and real estate developer Damac.
“The Russian market is attractive enough to the Arabian investors. In particular the Russian power industry contains a number of promises for investments,” Fahd Hamidaddin, marketing director of state-run Saudi Arabia General Investment Authority, said during an interview with Infox.ru in July. Read the rest of this entry »
Jul. 20 – Russia reported good economic results during the first half of the year, although investment activity remained low.
From January to July, Russia’s GDP grew by 4.2 percent compared to the same period last year, Elvira Nabiullina, Russia’s economic and trade minister said yesterday during the government session.
“This is quite a good dynamic for the economy to recover from the crisis,” Nabiullina said. “The export intensity – 50.1 percent growth for the first half of the year – was one of the primary factors which moved economy together with retail trade which grew by 3.4 percent. ” Read the rest of this entry »
May 21 – The Russian government wants to implement the same measures used for the construction of Olympic-related facilities in the city of Sochi, host of the XXII Winter Olympic Games in 2014, for the country’s entire building industry. According to Russian Vice Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak, a simplification of the construction legislation will attract new investors to the industry.
The government plans to address Parliament with a package of bills by the end of the year in order to simplify land right procedures similar to what was done in Sochi. “Many decisions have been made and new standards have been obtained, especially for the Olympic project. Right now, the job is to implement the majority of these updated rules and principles to the whole industry,” said Kozak, while adding that the government is already working on the relevant bills. Read the rest of this entry »
May 19 – The Russian State Duma is exempting all developers operating under the law regulating shared-equity construction from value-added tax. All housing deals using private capital and creating property rights will now be made under shared equity law.
Although deputies believe that the VAT exemption opportunity will motivate developers to operate under the law, construction industry representatives doubt this will boost legal real estate sales. The Federal “Law on Shared Participation Construction,” which was implemented in April 2005, defined the rights of investors in shared-equity construction projects — building projects in which future apartment owners finance the complex’s construction. In reality, many companies developed alternative “gray” schemes that limited investors’ rights. Developers’ bankruptcies have caused a number of prospective homebuyers involved in such schemes to invest their money in vain, without obtaining housing or the chance to be defended in court. Read the rest of this entry »
May 13 – Current land and real estate tax might be replaced by new property tax laws in 2013 after the next presidential election in Russia.
According to Vedomosti, the new tax laws should become a basis for filling local budgets. The Ministry for Economic Development and Trade and the Ministry of Finance said the new tax will be collected from the real market cost of the property which is larger than official estimations of the Federal Bureau of Technical Inventory.
The new system for estimating market cost of a property is currently being developed. Independent appraisers are supposed to use this system for property value estimation. It is not yet clear how large the increase in property tax rates will be. “If the tax scale increases, prices might grow more than one hundred times,” said Taxadvisor partner Dmitry Kostalgin. Read the rest of this entry »
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