Russian Home-Building in Transition

Since 1991, the reform governments of the Russian Federation and its constituent republics have allowed and, in varying degrees, encouraged the privatization of state-owned housing and new residential construction by private firms for private ownership. This study describes the emergence of private home-building enterprises engaged in two types of projects: (1) The completion and sale of multifamily dwellings started during the socialist regime and (2) development and marketing of single-family luxury housing on land at the urban fringe. It is based on surveys of private housing developers and secondary housing markets in seven cities of the Russian Federation, including Moscow and St. Petersburg. The surveys were conducted by Russian consultants in 1993 under the sponsorship of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Bank. At the time of the surveys, not all aspects of real estate development were yet conducted under private institutions. The developers' most important functions were arranging project financing from private sources (own funds, homebuyers' prepayments, bank loans) and marketing the dwellings, usually prior to completion. Municipal governments still controlled land allocations for new housing. Municipal enterprises were also responsible for providing access roads and utility connections, using their strategic position to exact fees, which account for a fourth to two-thirds of the total development costs. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, a substantial fraction of the completed dwellings were contractually assigned to the municipality for disposition and, in all places studied, additional units were sold to the developers' employees, suppliers, and city officials at a discount. Conditions that are necessary for further development of market-based home-building include (1) development of more market-oriented land policies by municipalities, (2) development of more rational and feasible fees charged to developers by cities, (3) modernization of utilities in cities, and (4) increasing developers' understanding of importance of market studies.