Townhouses are cheaper
Participants in the residential real estate market are anxiously awaiting July 1st. On this day, the preferential mortgage program ends, which in recent years has been the main driver of demand in the new buildings sector. Buyer activity also fell on the secondary market: in the spring, average prices for finished apartments continued to rise slowly. In the current situation, according to experts, properties outside the city look most attractive. Some formats of suburban housing, as analytics for the Moscow region have shown, have significant potential for price growth.
This spring, unexpectedly for experts, townhouses became the favorites of the housing market. Each apartment in such a low-rise atypical building usually has a separate entrance from the street, sometimes a garage and a small front garden. The finest hour of townhouses in Russia struck in the 2010s. Then the fashion for them passed. However, townhouses are actively being bought and sold in the Moscow region, the largest and most liquid local suburban market in the country.
According to the general director of the World of Apartments portal Pavel Lutsenko, now the most houses of this format are sold in Istra, Solnechnogorsk, Podolsk, Aprelevka, Khimki, Domodedovo, Mytishchi, Dolgoprudny, Odintsovo and Zvenigorod. The most expensive townhouses in the Moscow region are sold in Korolev, where they cost an average of 37.5 million rubles. And also in Krasnogorsk (37.4 million), Odintsovo (36.0 million), Dolgoprudny (34.4 million), Istra (29.8 million), Noginsk (29.5 million), Khimki (26.8 million) , Ivanteevka (25.0 million), Mytishchi (23.2 million) and Balashikha (23.1 million).
The most affordable lots can be found in Yegoryevsk (5.3 million rubles), Bronnitsy (5.5 million), Klin (6.5 million), Naro-Fominsk (8.8 million), Losino-Petrovsky (9.7 million ), Sergiev Posad (11.1 million), Shchelkovo (11.4 million), Kolomna (13.6 million) and Chekhov (14.3 million). On average, a townhouse in the Moscow region costs 18.9 million rubles.
Over the last year, since May 2023, out of 37 large cities in the Moscow region, prices for townhouses have increased in 26, fallen in 10, and remained the same in one city. The most expensive properties in Solnechnogorsk (+87.8%), Stupino (+65.8%), Voskresensk (+61.3%), Kolomna (+54.7%), Domodedovo (+48.7%), Noginsk (+46.6%), Krasnoarmeysk (+21.9%), Krasnogorsk (+16.9%), Zvenigorod (+15.9%) and Sergiev Posad (+14.2%).
Townhouses fell in price, according to Lutsenko, in Dedovsk (-28.2%), Yegoryevsk (-21.9%), Balashikha (-13.7%), Chekhov (-12%), Vidnoye (-9.3%) , Fryazin (–8.2%), Aprelevka (–5.3%), Ramenskoye (–2.5%), Dolgoprudny (–2.1%) and Istra (–0.7%). In general, over the past 12 months, prices for this type of real estate have risen in the Moscow region by 6%.
«It is interesting that townhouses, as a hybrid format, have risen in price more than apartments on the secondary market of the Moscow region (+1, 1%), but less than detached houses (+25.1%). The demand for them is several times lower than for country houses, but the supply is also small: fewer and fewer developers are taking on the construction of townhouse villages. As a result, the main proposal is focused on the secondary market,” Lutsenko noted.
The most budget-friendly options for suburban real estate are offered in the east, south-east and south of Moscow,” noted Elena Mishchenko, head of the urban and country real estate department of the NDV Supermarket Real Estate company.
“Now in the suburban market you can observe a unique moment when an apartment in a 9-15-story apartment building, located about 20 km from the Moscow Ring Road, can be bought at a price of 220 thousand rubles. per sq. m. And in the same location, a house with its own plot of 5-6 acres is sold at a price of 165 thousand per hundred square meters. A townhouse with its own entrance and a small plot of 1-2 acres is sold at a price of 112 thousand per hundred square meters,” emphasized Ekaterina Kogan, director of the marketing department of FSK Family. In her opinion, individual housing construction and townhouses are very undervalued and in the near future their prices will catch up with the prices of apartments.
As Lutsenko believes, townhouses built by a professional developer no more than 8 years ago have the greatest potential for price increases. , in a residential, organized village of “comfort+” or “business class” class.