The new president, strictly in keeping with tradition, signed a decree concerning land – “On measures to develop housing construction”.

A special Federal fund will be created to assist the development of housing construction; all officials have been ordered to draw up a list of lots situated within settlements (or close to them) and in federal ownership. Land belonging to state institutions that is not being used for its intended purpose will be transferred to the Fund. The main task of the fund is to “help the growth of individual and other housing construction and according infrastructure.” It would seem that for the first time in an official document, priority is not given to multistory industrial building, but private construction. Meanwhile, the private sector is developing very well anyway.

Incidentally, according to data from Rosstat, in the first quarter of this year 110,300 apartments were built in Russia with a total area of 10.2 million sq.m. This is 7.8% more than in the equivalent period last year. And over half of these (5.3 million sq.m.) apartments are in individual houses, a total of 38,600, which people built themselves, with their own (or borrowed) money. Growth in the private sector is 14.6%... 

According to data from analysts at Itaka, at the start of the second quarter 114 cottage settlements were sold in the Leningrad Oblast. The growth of the number of settlements (since early 2007) was 36%, and 5% for the quarter. Last year 20 settlements were completely sold, and 5 in the first quarter of 2008.

Another source – the marketing department of Peterburgskaya Nedvizhimost – gives similar figures. According to their information, sale has been opened in 96 cottage settlements, while another 88 are being planned. 17 settlements went on sale in the first quarter, including “Sosnovy Khutor” (Sibir Evrostroi), “Storozhevaya Gora” (Rodeks Severo-Zapad), “Solnechny Bereg” (PulExpress).

At the same time, the new organized settlements are becoming larger. The volume of construction is 1,311,000 sq.m. This represents a growth of 81% for the year (relative to the 1^st quarter of 2007). The total number of housing development is over 8,500.

On the whole, it is a serious market, and quite comparable with the city market (around 38,000 new apartments last year, 2.7 million sq.m.). And there are plans for 300,400 and even 700 hectares, for hundreds of houses…

And this is only organized construction; there is also the private sector, which is at least as large. Public opinion experts have conducted surveys showing that 69% of Russian citizens would be happy to move from the crowded city to their own private house.

But I’m afraid that the government’s ambitious plans are unlikely to be fulfilled. People “would be happy” to move, but it doesn’t mean that they actually will. It is strange that in many analytical reports on the country market the classification of distance from Petersburg is used. But no one calculates the distance in hours and minutes, although this is exactly what people what to know: how long it will take to get to work and back.

But no one can help them – and there is quite an objective reason for this. It may take 5 minutes to drive from Sertolovo on Wednesday afternoon, for example, but over an hour on Sunday evening. And the traffic on Sunday evening at the end of May is quite different from Sunday evening at the end of November…

So there are no accurate estimates, while the factor of transport access becomes increasingly important. According to data from Bekar, this factor is one of the three most important in making a purchase. The limit of acceptable access is constantly changing. The transport criterion is important, although it is not in first place. It is not the distance that is important – it is the state of the roads, number of lanes etc. “Recently clients have lost interest in options on the Priozersk Highway,” says Sergei Drozdov. “The roads are better in the south, but in the north they’re very bad (apart from “Scandinavia”). The Murmansk Highway is acceptable. The Kiev Highway is being repaired at the moment, and when the repairs end it will be excellent. And in the south generally, the transport situation will be a lot better in a year or two”.

The general director of Garant Development, Dmitry Alkhov, says that commuting time is one of the most important factors in realizing development projects in the country.

The Vsevolozhsk region’s share in low-rise construction is so large (over a third of the total of cottage projects) and continues to rise for this reason, according to Alkhov: “It’s easier to get to Vsevolozhsk – so the share there is greater. Petersburg stretches from north to south. Yanino, for example, is a continuation of Nevsky Prospekt. If you drive straight ahead from the Admiralty, you will get to Yanino. In the north of the city, there is a transport collapse. This hasn’t happened in the eastern part yet. Things are also a little easier in the south. The Priozersk Highway is being repaired, but you still need to get to it first!”

Svetlana Neveleva, an advisor at Stinkom company (Stinkom was one of the first to start major projects 100 or more kilometers from Petersburg), notes that large sections near water are becoming increasingly rare in the seasonal housing segment: “Buyers are prepared to put up with bad roads and considerable distances if they can live by a lake. If the object is next to water, then 120-130 km doesn’t scare them”.

Andrei Bochkov, the deputy general director of PulExpress, also says that the distance that is acceptable for buyers is increasing: “The village of Borisovo in the Priozersk region is 70 km from the city, and we started selling land in 2005, with 240 plots of land sold over the last year and a half. They started at 2,300 conditional units for 100 sq.m. Now the price is 10,000 units.”

“There is a seasonal migration of residents,” says the general director of Avers-Analitik, Dmitry Svitelman. “According to various data, from 2-2.5 million Petersburgers become residents of the Leningrad Oblast each summer season. According to figures given by officials, of the 1.8 million garden and dacha sections in the Oblast, 1.4 million belong to city residents. This is a very powerful seasonal vector which is directed from the city to the Oblast”.

And all these people use the treacherous roads of the Oblast.

Tens of thousands more will join them in the years to come: enormous housing complexes are being built in Kudorov and Mistolovo, in Yukki and Nizino… But there are no jobs in Yukki or Mistolovo, and none will appear – the jobs are all in the city. And the developers cannot solve the problem of transport access on their own.

“The government’s main task is to build roads. They are the veins of the economy. Otherwise the economy will simply come to a halt. All the government should do is to keep track of the debts owed by the people and develop the transport network. People will do the rest themselves,” says Alkhov.

Change in amount of country real-estate by distance from the center of Petersburg, %